


T'was the Week Before Christmas (and All Through the House...was Chaos)

by Tattered_Dreams



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Christmas Tree discrimination. or something, Christmas fic, Domesticity, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Modern AU, Sexual Content, Slice of Life, There's swearing, a tire iron, dont ask, holiday fic, i guess?, the apartment is almost a character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 01:21:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21908986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tattered_Dreams/pseuds/Tattered_Dreams
Summary: They've been doing this for years now. They know the drill. Thomas and Newt and their friends have all the usual plans for their celebration of Christmas Week...with all the usual bickering and last minute changes, though this year, there's also a not-so-usual unexpected guest.But maybe it's the craziest entwined lives that just look like family when you're seeing them from the outside.
Relationships: Gally/Minho (Maze Runner), Harriet/Sonya | Elizabeth "Lizzy" (Maze Runner), Newt/Thomas (Maze Runner)
Comments: 19
Kudos: 89
Collections: Maze Runner Secret Santa 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Gift for Persnickett for the tmrss 2019. Happy Christmas!

“We need a better couch.”

Newt hears Thomas shout out - fondness disguised as aggravation - and finishes pulling on his sweater before ducking around the doorway from the bedroom. He leans against the archway that connects the little kitchen to the living room and folds his arms, smirking. “Minho and I bought that couch at a sale for less than thirty of your US dollars.”

Thomas snorts without looking up. “You’ve lived here for over four years; they’re your US dollars too.”

He shoves at the sunken piece of furniture again, clearing it back a few feet across the carpet in the living room. For such a good deal on a sofa (couch, whatever) that’s seen better days, it weighs a worrying amount. The first week that they brought it home - needing Gally and Thomas to help them get it up four flights of stairs - Winston had come over from down the hall to take a knife to the frame, just in case it had been packed with anything.

It hadn’t been. It’s just heavy. It’s a caramel colored, brushed cotton three-seater that’s even long enough (just) for Gally, and the space it offered is one of the reasons they’d bought it.

(“Not leather,” Newt had protested as they walked around Living Spaces in search of ideas. “It gets freezing cold in the winter and too hot in the summer.”

“Pussy,” Minho had said. “What do you Brits know about hot summers anyway?”

Newt ran into him with the shopping cart.

“Ow, fuck, Man,” Minho shook himself out, hauling his shoelace free from the wheels and almost overbalancing. “I’m just saying- Leather is wipe clean.”

“Gross,” Thomas muttered.

“Stop having sex on the couch and it wouldn’t matter,” Minho fired back. “Fine - what about corduroy?”)

Thomas tugs the corner of the rug out of the way and shunts it a little further, making a hollow kind of noise as it roughs up the carpet. Newt sighs, rolling his eyes and moving across the room to help.

He gets a good grip on the arm, braces and then lifts, saying through gritted teeth, “Why is it we’re always the ones moving our apartment around for everyone else?”

Thomas kicks at his end and gestures vaguely behind them at the TV. “Because we can’t reach the Xbox if it stays here all year and we can’t fit in the tree, or all of our friends if we leave it there.”

Newt pivots his half and drops it with a too-loud bang on a wide angle to the rest of the room. “Always our place, though. We should do Christmas week at one of theirs again.”

Thomas shoots him a dubious look. “Like whose?”

Newt has to admit, he may have a point. There’s a reason they stopped the others hosting.

Gally and Minho have a very fussy landlady.

In some fairness to Mrs. Grady, they do seem to spend their free time finding new ways to torment and infuriate her. They tried to do Christmas Week at their apartment three years ago; their first one officially living together. It started cute, but within an hour the tiny old woman was reaming them out at unnatural decibels for the chaos they were causing as they tried to drag an eighteen-foot christmas tree up ten flights of stairs.

(It’s not like they’d planned on success, Minho had assured them, already proudly standing in the kitchen by a four foot potted fir covered in tinsel and gingerbread biscuits. The point had purely been to get it at least three flights up, shouting “pivot!” as much as possible to see how many of the other tenants they could annoy into the hallway. The eighteen footer had still been still wedged somewhere on the corner between four and five at the time).

Brenda had flatly refused to ever endure Mrs. Grady’s ranting ever again. So they’re out.

Brenda’s apartment is not much better off. It’s a nice place, but roughly the size of a shoebox. It’s not nearly big enough for all of them. So she’s out. Frypan has been away on a paid culinary program for his job but he pays rent for a room in a shared duplex so that’s also a no-go. Zart still lives with his parents.

Sonya and Harriet live on the seventh floor of Newt and Thomas’ building. It was a collective decision that seven flights up is just too many, and both of their jobs require a fair bit of confidentiality, so it’s easier for them to just not have guests much.

Winston and Jeff live down the hall but...well....they’re not an option, either.

So for the last three years (following the quick evacuation of Minho and Gally’s after the tree incident) Thomas and Newt have been the default.

“Alright, yeah,” Newt concedes. “Better not.”

Thomas smiles, a fond, wry tug of his mouth. “It’s not that bad, though, right?” he says, shrugging and sitting down on the couch. Newt watches his back curve forwards, stretch out his t-shirt, and he bites on his tongue quickly.

“What isn’t?”

Thomas nods vaguely at the room and Newt looks around it.

There’s the single armchair that basically swallows anyone who sits in it like it had a previous life as a venus flytrap. They own four bean bags. One is held together with duct tape, another has sharpie scrawled across it saying ‘Lapp Dances $2’ (A long story that bottles down to a very drunk night after finals one year). The other two are, surprisingly, not vandalized. The walls are painted a pale, faded green like watercolor and the main attraction is the one they’ve used as a scrapbook.

They don’t own a coffee table, and aside from the bookcases and work desk, there aren’t many surfaces around. A stack of stuffed cardboard boxes containing their combined Christmas decorations has been sat next to the armchair since the fifth, just waiting for this week. It’s mostly picked up a moonlighting gig as a side table.

The kitchen is a little ramshackle but it’s their normal - they know which cupboards need a good bash to open and which drawer handles you can’t use because they’ll fall off. It tucks in next to the front door and acts as a through route. There’s never a draft, their heating is reliable and all the electrical outlets work.

Newt pushes himself off the wall and crosses the room, leaning out over Thomas on the couch until they’re breathing the same air. Thomas’ smile shifts into something solid and bright.

“Not that bad being home, you mean?” Newt says quietly to him.

Thomas reaches up. Newt’s medical dog-tags have slid free of his shirt and hang, swaying down between them. Thomas hooks his fingers into the bead chain in a way that’s so familiar and reverent that it aches in Newt’s bones. His heart surges as the chain presses at the nape of his neck, so gently.

“You are home,” Thomas replies. “But being here is good too.”

He draws Newt forward, fingers curling around the chain, and locks their mouths together, slow and careful. Newt allows it for a moment, until he starts to feel the burn of holding himself up; the faint way his left leg gives a ghostly kind of twinge.

It’s been years since the injury that almost crippled him, and time away from it means it doesn’t hurt so readily now, so sharply or suddenly or drawn out as it once used to. Still - best not to test it quite like this.

Newt pulls back and Thomas lets go of the tags. “Moving our home around on the nineteenth is good?”

“If we got a new couch that wouldn’t be such a big deal,” Thomas points out, wheedling.

“This is a good couch,” Newt says on a sigh, even though amusement and anticipation are coiling tight in his bloodstream, faintly metallic, alkaline and sugar.

“Uh-huh,” Thomas utters, then reaches out like lightning strike and tugs hard on Newt’s sweater. Newt laughs, dropping himself comfortably over Thomas’ lap even as Thomas pulls the cable knit and the shirt underneath clean off over his head. “Show me.”

Newt snatches his wrists, gooseflesh prickling down his spine in the wake of the fingerprints Thomas has already tracked there. His skin is bare, nerve endings prickling in the air of the open room because they don’t overuse their heating. It’s a contrast to the heat flooding his veins that’s intoxicating; makes the world sharper. The metal dog-tags rest over his sternum, weightless in their normalcy. Newt lets go of Thomas’ hands, then tears at his t-shirt, and Thomas rises up on the couch to help throw it aside.

Newt kisses him while he’s distracted, swallows the groan at the back of his tongue and then leans his weight into it, pushing them sideways and down. Thomas’ hands are back on him, playing patterns on his shoulder blades like he’s tuning a guitar, his hips shifting restlessly until Newt can fall into the cradle of his pelvis and press down hard.

Newt squeezes the nape of his neck, just a little, enough to crack him open on a raw inhale, and then moves faster. Sometimes kissing Thomas is like chasing a high, and sometimes it’s like coming down from one. This one is adrenaline like nitrogen in his veins, burning up and blazing cold.

He pulls away again a moment later, drags his tongue down the cord in Thomas’ throat, because he remembers the debate and won’t leave Thomas with the last word on it.

“Stop thinking about the couch,” Newt says, biting the words across Thomas’ collarbone. He sucks hard on the bone until he can feel Thomas’ pulse on his tongue; a ferocious skitter, even though it’s not somewhere you’d usually feel it.

Thomas’ exhales brokenly through his open mouth. “I would if you were doing a better job.”

Newt surges upward and kisses him, pressing a thumb into the soft space under Thomas’ jaw as he licks into his mouth with purpose. He pulls back the second Thomas starts to respond, lifting himself on one arm and pressing his hand flat right in the place where Thomas’ collarbones swoop into the hollow of his throat.

“You want me to do a better job?” he asks.

He rocks his hips down and forward, feels Thomas harden at the same time his breath catches under Newt’s palm. A bitten groan rolls deep at the back of Thomas’ throat and his head falls into the cushions. The tight wind of muscle under his skin goes lax, the faint ridges of his abdomen feathering and flattening to a single plane of sinew as his body yields.

“Fuck yes,” he breathes.

Newt’s fingers are on his belt in the next instant, flicking it open and tugging it free before going for his jeans.

He watches the tension seep back in; the way Thomas inhales with his diaphragm, the interlace of muscle either side of his ribs and the ripple of movement down his stomach.

Newt leans close over him, raking his fingers down the trail of dark hair. Hands or mouth, he hasn’t quite decided yet, and he scrapes his teeth bluntly at the side of Thomas’ neck before asking, “Still thinking about the couch?”

Thomas jack-knifes under him. His hips twist up and he traps one of Newt’s legs between his own. At the same time he twists his fingers back around the medical dog-tags hanging again from Newt’s neck. It’s a long chain, and with Newt hovering like this, the tiny metal plates rest on Thomas’ bare skin. Thomas folds them into his hand, though, taking up the length of chain and hooking his index finger through it to pull Newt’s head down.

The bite of the links at the back of his neck has the same power it always does; a scalding rush, white heat that blooms between his shoulder blades and washes down his spine.

Newt gives in to it, sinks until he’s low enough that Thomas can stretch his neck and kiss him, a fluttering, soft thing before he pulls again and licks deeper, paints his taste onto the roof of Newt’s mouth.

It takes Newt a minute to realize that Thomas’ free hand is working at his belt and he fights the draw of the chain to lift up.

Thomas goes for the belt loops on his jeans instead, dropping all attempts at subtlety, pulling him forward, almost off-balance, and Newt reaches down to intercept him. Thomas releases the chain with a stifled laugh so he can try pulling off Newt’s belt with both hands, and they grapple for a moment, trying to dive past each other’s fingers, Newt’s weight bearing down, teetering sideways on the couch. Both of them are laughing in snatched breaths as Newt finally catches Thomas’ wrists and shoves them hard into the couch above his head.

Thomas tries to buck him off with his hips and instead Newt rides him down, knees braced until they’ve both stopped laughing. Thomas has gone still instead, hard and tense underneath him. He sucks in a breath, his eyes quiet and warm, dilated and ringed in whiskey-gold.

“No hands,” Newt tells him, pushing pointedly before letting go, trusting him to leave them there.

Thomas obeys. His fingers curl, clench up, tendons inside his wrists standing in sharp relief, but he leaves them.

“You like my hands,” Thomas says, shrugs, in a way that pulls his shoulders and stretches the flat line of his body.

Newt doesn’t deny it, but he doesn’t reply, either. He sits up, tugs at Thomas’ jeans, and has just decided that maybe ‘no hands’ should mean him too, when-

There’s a knock at the door.

Thomas freezes again between Newt’s knees, a very different sort of stillness. He’s stretched on the couch, muscle and sinew pulling taut in lines of surprise rather than anticipation.

“Minho?” Thomas asks breathlessly.

Newt contemplates it. It’s possible, though he thinks Minho would know better than to show up early. Ultimately- “He has a key, and he’s seen worse.”

Thomas snorts, but then there’s another knock; two beats, the second spaced out like it’s second-guessing.

Not Minho, then. He’s probably never hesitated about anything a day in his life, and regardless-

“Minho wouldn’t have knocked twice,” Thomas voices, as though he’d heard Newt’s thought. “Who-”

Newt groans softly.

He knows it’s Christmas week, but he was hoping for at least a little longer before all their friends started invading for the usual planning session. He drops his head, gently presses his thumb back into the hollow under Thomas’ jaw and kisses him. It’s gentle this time, a cooling promise. Then he stands up and redoes the buckle on his jeans.

Thomas breathes out and his body sinks back into the cushions. There’s already a mark on the wing of his collarbone.

Newt owed him today’s hickey anyway. Gally and Minho can keep their tradition of stockpiling the onsale Advent calendars and dipping gingerbread in the melted down loot - Newt and Thomas’ Advent is better.

Newt picks up his discarded t-shirt from the arm of the newly moved couch leaving his sweater behind, still inside-out. He slips around one of the beanbags and goes to get the door, raking a hand through his hair as he bypasses the kitchen. He’s not too concerned with much else. What did any of their friends really expect by showing up over an hour early? That he and Thomas would be sat chastely at opposite ends of the living room?

(Or, heaven forbid, unpacking the Christmas supplies themselves).

He pulls back the bolt on the door. They’ve stopped knocking, and they’re not telling him to hurry up, so it’s unlikely to be Brenda or Gally, either.

They have a peephole, but it’s been boarded up for over eighteen months. It’s not something they’ve really thought about fixing, especially since they don’t really get visitors; just the same group of friends, most of whom announce themselves at high volume through the deadbolts.

When Newt opens it this time, though, he doesn’t know the girl standing in the hall at all.

She blinks at him, startled almost, but she was knocking on their door so Newt’s guessing it’s less at the fact it opened and more because she hadn’t expected him any more than he’d expected her.

She’s pretty in a kind of sharp way; pale skin, eyes a vivid blue and long, raven dark hair. She’s bundled into a thick coat that doesn’t quite disguise her delicate bone structure and slim frame but she’s also hefting a stuffed flight bag over one shoulder. It looks heavy, yet the weight doesn’t seem to faze her. There’s also something edged about the way she holds herself; like her slight stature is just a good decoy for the fact that she could probably murder you without breaking a sweat.

Something about her ticks at the back of Newt’s head; a detached awareness that isn’t quite recognition that he can’t place. He’s got the oddest feeling he’s seen her face before, but he knows he’s never met her.

She frowns, glancing at the number on the door (wonky, because of that time that Gally punched it and the 7 fell off) and then back at him.

“You’re not Thomas.”

Not the wrong apartment, then.

He’s also abruptly aware of the fact that the person she’s looking for, he just left spread out on their couch, half naked and breathless.

(Perhaps he should be more bothered, but he’s not. Mostly he’s trying not to be too smug. It’s addicting, this kind of open honesty and certainty in what they’ve built that he can just enjoy living it and not care what others think).

“No,” Newt says even though it wasn’t a question and didn’t need an answer. He turns around, leaning back to try to look right through the apartment. “Tommy - it’s for you.”

There’s a clatter and a low groan and then Newt just spots Thomas standing up, fixing his jeans and lifting his t-shirt from the floor. He ambles through the kitchen, pulling it over his head and approaches the doorway, frowning a little. “Who is i-”

Newt is already shifting aside and Thomas stops in his tracks, his eyes blowing wide in shock.

“Teresa?”

The girl on the doorstep smiles carefully, halfway apologetic, and nods. “Hi, Thomas.”

“Holy-” Thomas swallows his words and then stumbles, catching himself on the kitchen counter as he continues over to them. Newt glances between them, still with a weird nudging sensation at the back of his brain. It isn’t jealousy, or worry; it’s synapses firing off, ricocheting around trying to pair the name to a face he thinks he’s seen.

There’s no animosity between Thomas and Teresa; just abject surprise, clean and clear. It’s almost mirrored, even though Teresa clearly knew she would find Thomas here.

“Hey, uh-” Thomas stops beside Newt, tugging his t-shirt straight, and his eyes skate over the flight bag. He looks distracted, a little worried suddenly. “Are you okay? Is everything-”

“I’m fine,” she says, waving him off. “I’m on winter break and, well...I just...didn’t want to go back to mom and dad’s this year.” She looks a little wounded, fingers toying with her bag strap. “I know it’s been a while - years - but… I just wanted to see you for a bit, if that was okay.” Here she darts a glance at Newt, uncertain. “I wanted to ask if you had space for me on Christmas Day but I think...am I interrupting something?”

“Well, yeah,” Thomas answers, half a laugh. “But seeing as you haven’t been around, I guess it was overdue?”

Some of her cautious tension sheds off, and her eyes are even brighter when she lets herself smile a little stronger; more hopeful. “It’s my prerogative. But I am sorry, though.”

Thomas shrugs. There’s an old hurt in it - something phantom that looks more like scar tissue than lingering pain. He shakes it off and folds himself around Newt. He’s a solid warm line at Newt’s back, and his hold is unapologetic, bold enough to make Newt’s pulse trip. Thomas feels almost like a livewire; his fleeting worry replaced already with an intangible, still surprised sort of abandon.

“Teresa, this is my boyfriend, Newt.”

Teresa’s eyebrows both lift, but there’s no judgement there. She looks....pleased.

“Boyfriend,” she repeats, fighting a smile. Her eyes flicker between them, coast over the wonky lettering on their door and then catch on Newt’s bare chest. She presses her lips together tightly, looking like she’s holding back both laughter and questions.

Thomas doesn’t move. His arms squeeze around Newt’s waist and send ripples of feverish affection out through his nerves. “Newt, this is Teresa. My sister.”

Sister.

Thomas doesn’t often talk about his family. They mostly give each other space but he's mentioned them from time to time, usually around their intermittent texts. He told Newt the story before they ever got together; the growing household, the kind of people that his parents are. Newt has even spoken to his parents himself on a couple of short-lived occasions.

There’s a photograph on their wall of Thomas with a bunch of his siblings from years ago, before he finished school and ever left home. It’s been there since they moved in and put all the pictures up on the scrapbook wall. Most of them have faded from day-to-day recognition just because they’re always there, but now that Thomas has said it, Newt can picture that one for himself.

Teresa is older than the teenager in the photo. She had lighter hair then too, but the fiercely beautiful features and blue eyes are the same.

Newt is suddenly very aware he’s standing in a doorway in little more than his jeans and dog-tags.

“You should come in,” he says. It’s easy to tell based on Thomas’ spiky happiness that he’s not going to turn her away. “The others will be here soon.”

“Others?” Teresa asks, a little skeptically, but she steps over the threshold and lets Newt close the door behind her.

x

It’s strange, watching Teresa slowly make her way around a space that Thomas has never shared with her before. It’s especially strange because his childhood is full of spaces they’ve existed together; rooms at home, classrooms at school, diners and coffee shops around the city. She’s never been here, though.

Teresa left first. At the time, it had felt like a betrayal.

She turned eighteen and left for college. Thomas was sixteen, still another two years to go before he could follow her, and suddenly he was the oldest in the house, left like a kite with its strings cut without his sister to talk to, to share that responsibility. By the time Thomas turned eighteen, he’d realized it wasn’t a betrayal at all; just how growing up worked. Not calling any more, maybe that was on her, but now he understands what it is to be caught up in a life far away.

He’d left too. At first it was just for his own years in college, but he never went home again.

He met Brenda the first day of Orientation, and her adoptive father, Jorge not long after that. He had them from the start, stumbled into Newt barely six months later, and never looked back. He’s twenty three with a two year shared lease on an apartment with his boyfriend, two states away from where he grew up and he’s happy.

He just hadn’t quite noticed he’d missed Teresa until now.

“Not what you expected?” Thomas asks her.

She turns around, standing in the middle of the living room, and her expression softens with fondness and nostalgic affection.

“Actually, I think it is,” she says.

Thomas raises his eyebrows and slumps further down the wall where the kitchen pours into the living space. Thinking of their parents’ home with the bright white walls and galleried landing, the silverware and art canvases, Thomas can’t help being a little sceptical. “It is?”

Teresa looks around again, and Thomas tries to see it from her eyes.

It’s clean and warm, the door has two locks and a deadbolt. The windows face south so there’s lots of natural light all through the day, casting a rainbow of hazy morning blues to streaky evening pinks against the clock. Old textbooks and second-hand paperbacks are bursting from the bookshelves, and their scrapbook wall is plastered with maps and photographs, all linked together in a spiderweb of coloured thread and pushpins.

The furniture is mismatched and a collection of succulents lives on the windowsill - ostensibly as deterrents for hopeful pigeons in the summer, but in actuality it’s because Zart can’t keep them at home.

It is small, though, and it’s cluttered and disoriented and lived in, which is unlike anything Thomas had before it.

“It’s you,” Teresa says, which drags his attention back. “At least... it’s bits of the you that I remember, and bits of one I don’t know.” She turns a circle in the room, still in her winter coat, hair loose around her shoulders. She looks back at him with a smile that comes out of his memories. “You were always brilliant, so smart,” she says, “You could have been a CEO or a criminal mastermind but I’m glad you just chose to be happy instead.”

Thomas shrugs lightly. “My friends make that easy.”

Teresa shoots him a sideways look, her fingers tracing across a thick afghan blanket folded on the back of their armchair. “And your boyfriend?”

Thomas rolls his tongue and ducks his head even though it can’t stop the blush. He darts a glance over to the corner of the kitchen where Newt’s making tea and texting rapidly, his brows furrowed in an expression of dry exasperation. Probably Minho, then. As Thomas watches, he lets go with one hand and pulls at the tire iron they have hooked into their cutlery draw to yank it open and fish out a spoon. He hip-checks it closed again - as closed as it will get with a metal rod in it - and goes right back to texting.

Thomas shrugs again, turning back to Teresa. “And him, yeah.”

“Newt?” she asks, the same way everyone does because that’s not a real name.

“Short for Newton,” Thomas shoots back. “He doesn’t like to be called that.”

Teresa clearly has better things to ask than why. “You live together.”

Thomas lifts his eyebrows and says nothing. He figures that one is pretty obvious. Teresa suddenly looks like the seventeen year old girl he remembers as she rolls her eyes and her shoulders slump emphatically.

“I’m sorry,” she bursts. “I just can’t believe I missed so much - I know, I know-” she cuts in, before Thomas can point it out “-it’s my fault. I’m just...sorry.”

“Do they know you’re here?” Thomas asks.

“Not yet,” Teresa says quietly. “Mom forwarded me your address, but they don’t know I got some time free from the program, let alone that I booked a ticket out here. I’ll tell them soon, I just wanted to see you first. In case, you know? But I don’t really know where to start.”

“How about with why you’re here now?” Thomas suggests carefully. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but why now?”

Teresa sighs and nods. “Yeah that’s fair,” she says. “Are you, though? Happy to see me?”

Thomas smiles sadly. “It hurt, you just leaving. And when college got too busy for you to come home as much. And then you just kind of...stopped calling too. It hurt but it didn’t stop me missing you. And then I left - I came all the way out here and...I started to get it. College is crazy and it fills up your life, but being away was also like being free in a way we never got at home.”

He stands up, away from the wall and crosses to her. He’s taller than she is now, and it feels like something he’s lost to realize it happened in the last five years and there was a time in there they’d have been the same height. 

“I’m happy to see you,” he says gently. “I forgave you for leaving a long time ago.”

Teresa looks momentarily close to tears, but Thomas has never known her to cry; she was always more shrapnel steel than sorority girl. She doesn’t shed them now, either, just exhales with something like relief and smiles.

“So it’s okay I came? I missed a lot and whether you believe it or not, this is my first year in the biology program that I’ve had longer than a week away from the lab. I’m staying with a friend in a local airbnb so you don’t have to put me up, but if it’s okay...I’d really like to see you for Christmas.”

Thomas glances back over at Newt, but Newt’s already giving him an expectant look and waves him on. Three mugs are steaming on the counter next to him. Thomas offers Teresa a smile that’s only slightly wicked.

“I’d like that too,” he says. “But...give it an hour. You might come to regret it.”

x

An hour later sees Minho letting himself into the apartment with as much noise and fanfare as he can manage.

Thomas hears the door open and then bang shut, followed by the clatter and bustle of coats, bags and boots as more than one person files into their kitchen. Then Minho appears from around the wide archway, one hand clapped over his eyes and the other thrown out blindly, feeling his way across the wall.

“Please God, don’t be naked again,” he says. “And tell me you moved the couch.”

Newt, laid on the relocated couch, reaches out with his good leg to kick a beanbag at him. It falls with a pitiful _whump_ right in Minho’s path and the next step he takes, he goes pinwheeling over it, face first into the carpet.

“Fuck,” he swears with a mouthful of fibres. “Asswipe.”

“Idiot,” Newt fires back. “Watch where you’re going.”

“Not when I’m coming in here unannounced,” Minho scoffs. He gets up carefully, groaning and tucking a hand around his stomach. His eyes are still squeezed shut. “Never again.”

Newt sits up, folding forwards with his elbows on his knees. A smirk curls his mouth and one eyebrow arches up. “You aren’t unannounced. It’s the nineteenth. We do this every year. You’re not even early this time.”

Minho points at him, a vicious stab in the air, but with his eyes still closed, he misses Newt by about two feet.

“Never again,” he repeats, very seriously to the floor lamp.

Newt snorts.

Thomas hasn’t moved, still sitting on the floor by the TV, and he shakes his head, flushing a little as he shoots a glance at Teresa. It’s not exactly that he’s trying to keep any of his life a secret from her, but sometimes there are more...tactful ways to find out about certain parts of it than Minho.

Teresa is sitting curled up in their armchair, the afghan spread over her legs and holding the mug of tea that Newt made her. She’s silent, and it’s unclear if it’s out of shock or placid enjoyment, just watching the explosive entrance of their best friend.

Well. If she was going to reconsider sticking around for Christmas, or even sticking around for a Thomas she hasn’t known for five years, better that she decides now, maybe?

Thomas tries to convince himself he believes that.

“Minho,” he calls. “Open your eyes you dick.”

Minho turns to him and his eyes blink rapidly open as he registers that Thomas’ voice came from nowhere near Newt’s.

“Also last time was your fault,” Thomas adds.

Minho winces. And then he spots Teresa.

“Holy shit- you- she-” he stops, swallows hard and clears his throat. A hand leaps up compulsively to rub at the back of his head and there’s a flush in his cheekbones as he says, “Well this is awkward.”

“Jesus-” Newt mutters. He pinches the bridge of his nose but his muffled amusement still wracks through his shoulders.

Gally chooses that moment to appear from the kitchen. At over six foot, he looks almost too tall for the curved beam arching up to the ceiling above him, and it’s only marginally better when he slouches against the wall. He folds his arms, eyes skipping over Teresa in quiet acknowledgement before flitting between Thomas and Newt, split across the room.

A pulse of hesitation washes through his expression, and his brow furrows. Gally never really looks worried; it’s like it’s an expression his face just wasn’t designed for. Worry usually appears like this instead - something approaching annoyance.

“What’s up with you two?”

Thomas frowns back, perplexed. “Nothing?”

“It’s not normal to just show up here and not find the two of you-” Minho makes a swirling gesture with his hands, a wary glance in Teresa’s direction like he thinks this is a more subtle way of getting the point across.

Thomas tips his head back with a sigh that feels like it pulls up from the pit of his stomach.

Teresa snorts. It’s the first sound she’s made since Minho burst in, and it seems to startle everyone. Thomas snaps his head up to look at her.

She swirls her tea and shrugs at them, making a wince of apology before- “I believe it. Given what I arrived to…”

“Really?” Thomas asks plaintively.

(That’s not their fault either - _she_ hadn’t been expected).

Still, somehow, in the five missing years between them, he’d forgotten this part of her.

She showed up; an adult with his sister’s face, her smile and sharp eyes, and yet somehow so remote and new. He’s slowly realizing in glimpses that she’s still the same in every way that matters. She’s the same sister who snuck them sips of mom’s wine at a party even though they were underage, the same one who verbally eviscerated a school bully using words no twelve year old should probably have known.

She’s someone who had baldly lied at a moment’s notice to keep his bisexuality a secret before he was ready to share it. Then she’d turn around and talk about boys with him in the next breath.

Teresa replies, unimpressed, “You literally told me I was interrupting.”

“See?” Minho insists with great gusto. “Also who is she?”

“So you two are good?” Gally checks.

“We’re fine,” Newt says.

Thomas glances Teresa’s way but she’s at ease; unfazed by Minho’s exuberance and antics, or Gally’s face, which is imposing all on it’s own. It seems strange, suddenly, that these parts of his life haven’t ever crossed until now.

“This is Teresa,” Thomas says. “She’s my sister.”

Minho’s eyes go round. “Sis-” his gaze darts to the wall - the scrapbook mural of sheet maps, spread open and taped up, dotted with pins pressed into cities, coloured thread linking them and branching off at spiky angles. There’s all the photos as well, taped into every available gap and spanning years.

Thomas knows the one Minho is remembering. It’s the same one Newt glanced at when they came inside, like he was finally connecting a person to the frozen memory.

“Yep,” Thomas says. “That one.”

“Holy shit,” Minho says, and he drops like a stone onto the beanbag he tripped over. “There are so many things I need to ask you.”

Teresa smiles in the particular kind of wicked glee that only a sibling can manage. Thomas wonders when he’ll start regretting this.

Before he can start on any of the questions, Brenda appears behind Gally.

“You can’t give them shit. Whatever the two of you were doing in the shower when I got there to give you a lift was not about saving your water bill.”

She aims it flatly at Minho, amusement hidden away in her dark eyes, and swoops around him while Gally just bites at the inside of his cheek and drops his gaze. Minho looks more smug than he has any right to for someone who (apparently) is such a colossal hypocrite.

Brenda’s fingers cradle a huge steaming mug and she settles herself onto the arm of the couch. Her dark hair is still growing out, and it now just brushes the line of her shoulders, still flecked with snow. She’s in her usual ragged skinny jeans and biker boots, but she’s wearing an entirely uncharacteristic fuzzy Christmas sweater that’s honestly butt-ugly. 

Thomas winces just looking at it; the lurid red knit with loose tufts and embroidered with jagged white borders. Front and centre is a version of Rudolph that has a lazy eye (or just a knitting error) and the edge of a creepy grin under his muzzle. Puffy little pom poms are sewn to the lopsided antlers.

“What are you _wearing_?” Thomas asks her.

She scowls. “Don’t ask. Lost a bet. What did I miss here?”

x

Teresa is introduced to Minho, Gally and Brenda officially.

(Brenda, she learns, met Thomas before all the others. They’ve been attached at the hip for the better part of the entire five years Teresa has been out of contact, and she knows that’s her fault. She tries not to feel too much like she’s been replaced.

Gally and Minho spent seven entire months just sleeping together between classes their sophomore year before they realised they were slowly falling into a monogamous relationship. In a blowout screaming match in the middle of campus - an epic one, Minho says - they’d decided to give ‘them’ a try and never looked back.

“Thomas and Newt are the beta couple to our fanfiction,” Minho says and Gally pinches him. “Ow, fucker-”

“Stop calling us a fanfiction.”

Minho says, “Love you too, Babe,” and Gally goes pink, rolling his eyes, and doesn’t protest further).

It’s nice, really, getting to see them all storm through the apartment and know that these are the kind of people Thomas has in his life. They’re vivid and eclectic and so genuine, unabashed at being themselves despite her being there, someone they don’t know, in a place they didn’t expect. Teresa isn’t sure where that comes from - whether they just trust Thomas’ opinion of her or whether they’re the kinds of people who exist as they are without apology. 

There’s another knock on the door just moments later. Gally goes to open it because he’s closest, which is when two more people crowd into the archway with smiles and a box of cookies.

“This is Thomas’ sister, Teresa,” Brenda tells the two new girls. “Meet Sonya and Harriet.”

Sonya is a petite young woman, probably in her early twenties as well. She’s all willowy limbs and elfin features with long pale blonde hair thrown into a messy braid. She’s the kind of person who looks like they’re woven out of sunlight and wildflowers. Harriet has skin like burnished copper and the athletic figure of a runner. Her smile is a quietly beautiful thing that feels rare even as Teresa sees it. There’s a kind of fierce edge to her; it’s like admiring the beauty of a serrated blade.

Neither of them arrived wearing a coat, or any kind of protection against the cold at all.

“We live upstairs,” Sonya supplies, pointing at the ceiling. “Three more flights. It’s why we don’t host Christmas.”

(“That, and the other thing,” Gally adds.)

“Which sister?” Harriet asks.

“Older,” Thomas clarifies. “She was there first.”

Harriet nods at that like she asked a different question and got a different answer. She offers Teresa one of the cookies and says, “Good luck with all this.”

Teresa figures she doesn’t mean the baked goods.

After that, the stream of people doesn’t seem to stop and Teresa wonders if Gally propped the door open instead of someone having to answer it over and over.

The introductions are repeated several more times, and a few of the latecomers dart similar glances over to the scrapbook wall. It seems like that’s how they’ve all connected her; by that one outdated photograph of their family before she ever left for college.

No one mentions any of their younger siblings, though, so Teresa can’t decide if it means something good that they recognise her name, or if it means something bad that it’s all they know. It’s a fleeting thought for now, one easily set aside, because Thomas is happy, and no one seems bothered that she’s joined them even with no warning.

Zart arrives after Sonya and Harriet. He pulls a fluffy hat off of his bleached hair and waves a hello to the room with a hand covered in tiny band-aids. No one asks, so Teresa figures that must be normal.

After him is someone who seems, for the instant he appears, like he might have the wrong apartment. He’s lean and wiry, dark skinned and quick on his feet with his hair buzzed down the sides of his head.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says as he flits through the living room towards a side door that Teresa has learned is the bathroom. “Got a call from the Boss. Jeff’s on his way, he’s just showering the blood off.”

He shuts himself behind the door.

Teresa feels shellshocked, like a speeding bullet missed her by inches and the distorted air churned her organs in its wake. No one else appears bothered, though. The chatter paused as he appeared, and it resumes the moment he vanishes.

“Winson,” Zart says, which is when Teresa realises he didn’t get the apartment wrong. Zart smiles softly, eyes brimming with a sympathetic sort of understanding. “Yeah, that’s pretty normal. He’s like...like an old crazy cat lady? He has about nine of them but also...funding.”

“Funding,” Teresa repeats blankly.

“A lot of it,” Minho specifies, approaching them and holding out a glass of some kind of liquid to Zart. “It’s not an inheritance but no one knows where it comes from. Honestly, we think he might be Mafia.”

Zart nods solemnly.

Teresa is pretty sure they’re hazing her but it doesn’t really answer the other part. “What about the blood? Who’s Jeff?”

“His boyfriend,” Minho says sagely. “Or. Sorry. They’re ‘life partners’.” He says it with theatrical air quotes and a flat eyeroll.

“Ah,” Teresa says, even though she’s not sure she follows. “Does he...go home covered in blood a lot?”

“Only on bad days,” Zart intones.

“Leave her alone,” Newt cuts in, appearing at Minho’s shoulder and flicking him on the ear. “Jeff is a paramedic.”

“Spoil the fun, you prick,” Minho shoots at him without heat, rubbing his ear and retreating.

Newt flips him off. Minho blows him a kiss.

“So…” Teresa ventures, aiming it Newt’s way. “Winston is actually…?”

Far from clearing that up, though, Newt fires a helpless look at the bathroom door. His fingers spear through his hair, honey-gold in a disarray that half falls into his dark eyes. “No, that bit was true,” he admits. “We don’t know what he does - none of us - but the money comes from somewhere.”

Teresa can’t even manage an ‘Ah’ this time. Newt leaves and Zart follows, leaving her with a pat on the shoulder.

Jeff shows up after that, blessedly free of blood, and it seems like that’s finally where the arrivals stop.

It takes another half hour after everyone has piled in to actually get them all clustered together and paying attention.

Teresa had some wild times and more extroverted friends when she was in college, but since moving onto the biology program, most of the people she still keeps in touch with just seem more...focused. They know how to have fun, but Teresa has been on campus during the holidays before, and there’s still never been gatherings quite like this.

The apartment wasn’t big to start with, but full to the brim with so much kinetic energy, laughter and flying insults, there barely seems to be a free corner in it. Somehow, still, it’s not claustrophobic. There’s a welcoming kind of warmth that’s taken shape from the way they all exist together like there’s nowhere else they would choose to be.

Zart inspects the cactus plants on the windowsill, Minho hands out ever more peculiar drinks and Harriet looks like she might - impossibly - have fallen asleep with her face turned into Sonya’s ribs.

Finally, it seems like it’s time.

“Okay, all of you shut up for a second,” Gally says, standing in front of the TV. His iPhone is in his hand. “Christmas week.”

Brenda boos, Thomas high-fives her and Jeff says, “Solid eight for effort, but four for delivery.”

Gally whacks him around the head with a cushion.

While Jeff peels himself off the floor, Gally swings and throws it across the room at Brenda with unerring aim. Her mug of coffee - only half full now - slops over her ugly sweater and she yelps in delight. She wastes no time leaping upright to shed it off and then flings it at a corner where it sags into a heap, Rudolph’s lazy eye gazing up at the ceiling.

“Shut up, the bloody buggering lot of you,” Newt sighs. He’s folded around Thomas, an inverse to the way Thomas hugged Newt when Teresa first arrived at their door. They’re both holding the back of the couch, fingers laced together, Thomas bracketed between Newt’s forearms.

Newt is just ever so slightly taller, but Thomas is broader, and they fit; a cohesive pairing like enclosed rhyme in poetry; iambic pentameter in two living heartbeats.

Newt’s forehead rests against Thomas’ shoulder but he lifts it to glare at everyone.

They all shuffle to silence.

Gally rolls his eyes. “Just because you’re British.”

Thomas kisses the side of Newt’s head with a tiny, half hidden smile.

“Christmas week,” Gally starts again, thumbing across his phone to light it up. “Someone needs to get Fry from the airport in the morning. His flight lands at nine fifteen.”

“Already dibsed,” Brenda says. “Thomas and I are fetching him.”

“That means Newt too. Good, next,” Gally says before anything else can kick off, “Decorations.”

“Y’all can’t do decorations without a tree,” Jeff pipes up.

“What are you gonna do? Stand on the tree to reach?” Minho scoffs. “Put the rest up, dickface.”

“Bet you’d like a dick in your face,” Jeff mutters.

“Not yours.”

Jeff gives him the middle finger. Minho pokes his tongue into the inside of his cheek crudely. Gally looks like he sorely wishes he hadn’t thrown away his cushion.

“Our decorations are done,” Sonya offers with a shrug. “Same apartment layout. It’s not really big enough for anything huge so hanging a few bits shouldn’t take long.”

“You just volunteered,” Harriet says, eyes still closed.

Sonya’s attention drops to her lap and she brushes a finger over Harriet’s cheek, smiling. “You’ll catch me if I fall off a stool?”

“Always,” Harriet hums serenely.

“And sit with me for three hours in the Emergency room when I break an arm?”

“I’ll stay for two hours and no more.”

Sonya beams like this is any kind of grand romantic gesture and Jeff scowls at them both.

“No one is going to the Emergency room this year. We’re all overtaxed as it is and you’re looking at wait times in excess of nine hours right now. No one fall off a stool.”

“Use a trampoline like the rest of us,” Brenda sniffs.

Newt lifts his head again, eyes finding Jeff’s across the room. “Bring your med kit,” he suggests. “Just in case.”

“Next!” Gally bellows. “Shopping.”

A groan goes up in chorus around the room and protests break out. Gally casts his eyes around, but there’s no more nearby cushions so he reaches down by the TV and Xbox and comes up with a lightsaber.

“If you all want to skive off and not get gifts for your families that’s on you - see if I care,” he shrugs, aiming it at several people’s noses. His eyebrows are fearsome over the failing sound effects as the batteries start to die on him.

Teresa hasn’t said a word, content to watch it all unfold from her corner, and the lightsaber passes by her. She’s actually having a good time, warm and at ease in a way she hadn’t quite expected to be back when all the new faces kept pouring in. It’s clear that the group all love each other, though, and there’s no hint of true animosity in any of the bickering, no matter how vicious the hand gestures or insults get. Somehow, without asking anything at all of her, they’ve made her feel welcome.

It’s nice too - to be able to sit quietly without the pressure to take part that she’s sometimes felt when hanging out with her friends in the program. Even when they were off campus at the local bars or coffee houses over the weekends, it could still feel like partaking in study groups.

“Maybe we’ve done our Christmas shopping already,” Zart whines, leant far back out of the way.

Gally turns on him and everyone else droops while Zart goes cross-eyed and the lightsaber makes an exhausted buzz. Gally’s eyebrow lifts, unmoved and unimpressed. “Have you?”

The beat of hesitation says everything even before Zart admits, “...Well….no-but-”

Gally smirks. “Didn’t think so. Your mother lets you keep all your cactuses in her house but if that’s not worth a gift then that’s your problem.”

There’s a tap on Teresa’s shoulder and she startles, looking up to see Minho hovering by her chair. He holds out a drink in a tall glass for her. This one just seems to be plain water but a smirk curls at his mouth as she eyes it warily.

“It’s safe,” he says. Then he nods to Gally. “Gal is big on gifts. He makes a show, but he has this little brother - Chuck - and they’re kinda close. He loves him a lot. And his mom.”

Teresa slowly takes the glass from him. “That’s sweet,” she says, thinking of home, and how it feels so distant to the student house back near campus. The younger brothers and sisters she left behind always seem so much older every time she goes back. It was one of the more brutal parts of adulthood that she had to adjust to; that going after what she wanted meant leaving behind people she loved, missing their lives in order to live her own.

Gally appears to have heard them. He shoots a glance over at the armchair and Teresa tenses, wondering if talking is enough to give her a turn with the lightsaber. But he just narrows his eyes at Minho, unable even then to totally hide all the natural affection.

“The hell are you two conspiring about?”

“Just telling her you love your little brother,” Minho says, smirk twisting into something daring and alive.

“Say it again and I’ll gag you,” Gally warns.

Minho lifts his eyebrows. “You promise?”

“Okay can we please get back to this before you two need to find a room?” Brenda demands, rolling her eyes. “Who’s going to get the tree?”

“I’m banned,” Winston says, holding up a hand.

“You’re-wh- no, nevermind,” Thomas speaks up then quickly decides against asking. “I can go.”

“Me too,” Zart says.

“No!” Four people all rush to protest. 

Zart gapes, looking rather like someone just threw one of his succulents out of the window. He casts his eyes around at them all, teary and betrayed. “What?”

“No offence, Zee, but you were there for three hours last year,” Minho says. “And the year before that you almost bought three extra trees just because you formed an emotional attachment to the pinecones or some shit.”

“Full offence taken,” Zart replies offhand, and then insists, “I promise I will not hold you up. Come on - I’ll help you look for the healthiest tree, I won’t start any arguments about the anti-perspirant qualities of fake snow spray.”

“He’ll only go on his own if we don’t take him,” Newt says.

Zart sits up straighter suddenly, like that hadn’t occurred to him as an option and Gally throws Newt a filthy look.

Thomas shrugs. He squeezes Newt’s fingers between his; Teresa sees their hands tighten together, a small thing that communicates without words. “Awesome. Zart, you’re in. Gally, you’re coming because you can reach the roof of the Jeep.” Then Thomas twists to smile at Newt. “And you, I’m guessing.”

“How many idiots does it take to buy a tree?” Minho snickers from the archway.

“Just for that, you’re coming too,” Thomas tells him.

x

“Do you usually get much planned in those meetings?” Teresa asks some time later when everyone has slowly cleared back out.

Thomas watches her pull her winter coat on, flicking her hair out from under the collar. She’s getting ready to head out - back to the airbnb she booked not too far away. Thomas hopes it means something good that he’s not sad to see her go; that maybe it means he’s grown up without her and not that something between them broke a long time ago.

“Uh-no, not really,” he says after a beat, when he realizes he hasn’t answered. He waves an arm vaguely back at the living room behind them. “The week pretty much never goes as planned anyway, it’s more just getting everyone together. We’re all busy so we just hang out whenever we can but the holidays are...more, you know?”

“None of you have families to go home to?”

Thomas sucks in a breath, even though he knows she didn’t mean it like that.

Teresa’s expression twists sharply with regret. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

He smiles. “I know.”

They’re both well aware they have a family he could go home to, but there’s a reason she’s here this year, without warning, and not there. She hardly has room to throw stones.

Thomas shrugs. “Some of us do have family, and we split our time a bit, but family isn’t just blood - we know that. These guys- they’re family too.”

“I’m not judging,” Teresa says softly. “I didn’t mean to. It’s just...so strange - a good strange - seeing your life now. I don’t know what I was expecting but…”

“Yeah, no one’s ever really expecting Minho,” Thomas laughs, a peace offering.

Teresa smiles. “Or you with a boyfriend.”

Thomas opens his mouth to reply but isn’t sure where to start beyond feeling thick warmth flush under his skin. He takes a second, tries to consider what this life looks like from the outside again.

“You didn’t expect that?” he asks slowly.

“Please,” Teresa scoffs. “I knew you were bi before you did and you went out with guys before. What I mean is seeing you actually with someone - with him. You were always so…”

“Reckless?” Thomas supplies, smirking a little now that he gets it.

“Yeah. Always moving, bolting from one thing to the next. You never had a problem making friends, but I just don’t remember ever seeing you settled this way.” She has such a gentle expression, and for someone Thomas has always known as so sharp, she looks so muted, softened as she nods towards the living room. “Is it serious?”

Thomas turns his head to look back over his shoulder.

Newt got a phone call, which is the reason Teresa got up to leave in the first place. He’s standing over by the window, phone to his ear and fingers hooked absently through his dog-tags. He’s all wiry angles; the kind of sleek muscle that’s deceptive, could trick you into thinking he didn’t have it at all. He shakes his head, and Thomas can tell from his expression that he’s probably talking to Alby.

He met Newt eight months after moving away from home. Through all the ups and downs of classes, finals and the stress of graduating, of finding a job and learning to be an adult in a world that doesn’t exactly make it easy, they’ve been a constant. He could live without him - did, in fact, for months when Newt went back to England one summer - he’s done that and it works. It’s just that he doesn’t want to any more.

He turns back to Teresa, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, it’s pretty serious.”

She smiles at him, a slow-growing thing that burns bright and lights up her eyes. And then she nods to herself and stoops to pick up her bag, throwing it over her shoulder.

Thomas pushes off the kitchen island to stand upright. “You’re coming back tomorrow?”

“If that’s okay?”

“We’ll be back here after eleven, probably,” Thomas says, quickly running flight times and the route from the airport back in his head.

“Okay, well...see you tomorrow.” Teresa hesitates a beat, then nods and leaves.

Thomas watches her down the hall for a few moments before pulling inside and closing the door behind her. There may be no lingering resentment now; not for a while, but they do have to relearn a lot if they have any hope of holding onto each other. He’s not the impulsive teenager she left behind, and she’s not the big sister who disappeared overnight.

He wants to try, though.

He lets out a breath against the shut door and turns away from it.

The apartment feels almost too big, suddenly; cavernous and empty with all the discarded cups cluttered around the sink and cushions thrown around the room. Doing the dishes was always something that they played rock, paper, scissors for in the student dorms, hoping to avoid it, but it’s something to do.

He turns on the faucet over the sink to start filling it and he’s not even reached for the closest glasses on the counter when Newt catches his wrist.

“Leave them,” he says. He presses into Thomas’ back, reaching around him to shut off the water. “Minho was the one using our kitchen like a potion laboratory. He can clean it up himself.”

Thomas isn’t about to argue. Newt’s fingers tuck into his belt loops and he tugs lightly once before letting go and then hopping up onto the counter. It’s a practiced, spry little jump that shifts his weight from his good leg into his arms, his hips twisting as he goes so he can sit on the edge without ever overloading his damaged knee.

It’s something subtle that most people wouldn’t even see, but Thomas knows better.

“How was Alby?” Thomas asks.

Alby is one of Newt’s old friends from school back across the pond. He still lives somewhere out there in a shared flat (“It’s called a flat in England, Tommy”) and goes home when he gets a break from work. Thomas met him once, and has seen him over Skype and facetime on a bunch of occasions but he’s more Newt’s friend than he’ll ever be Thomas’.

Newt shakes his head, smiling, and reaches to open the refrigerator from his perch. “He’s good. Losing his shit because his little sister is flying to Thailand with college friends instead of going home. But they’ve got a full house anyway.” Newt looks up with a significant expression. “His dad’s going to be there.”

“Oh shit,” Thomas mutters, accepting the boxed pizza that Newt hands him. “What about his step-dad?”

“Also going to be there,” Newt says. “Ben didn’t have much going on, though, so he and his mum are going to gatecrash and join them. Might keep the situation defused.”

“They can hope,” Thomas agrees with feeling. He finishes tearing the wrapping off the pizza and throws it in on the oven shelf then sets the timer on the microwave. “He has an out, though, right?”

“Aliyah,” Newt says - Alby’s oldest sister. “She has a two year old. Flatly refused to be in the same room as their dad so she said Alby could crash with her if it went bad.”

Thomas turns from the stove and moves towards Newt. He knows that it doesn’t hurt much any more, but it’s almost muscle-memory; the way his fingers find the knot of ligament and sinew on the inside of Newt’s knee joint and start to rub in circles. Years ago he learned it used to help, and it’s been a long time since Newt pushed him away or pretended it didn’t make a difference.

Now, he just smiles softly, his eyes on Thomas’ hands; dark and feverishly warm.

“He’s always welcome out here," Thomas says. "I mean. It’s your home too, so you don’t need me to tell you but- You know that, right?”

If anything, Newt’s smile cracks at the edges, melting down even further, like the way a sword is forged from glowing liquid steel. He nods, his fingers lifting up to push through Thomas’ hair. “One new addition at once,” he says, pressing lightly at the base of Thomas’ neck, right where the vertebrae sit under his skin. It’s almost enough to make his vision swim as warmth slides through his veins, rich and thick as molasses.

“How about you? Teresa? Her being back?”

They’re gentle questions, but Newt’s voice is tipped like an arrowhead.

“Strange,” Thomas replies, sighing. “Not bad but...complicated, I guess. I’m just not really sure I know her any more and I don’t know how to feel about that, either.”

“There isn’t a right answer, you know that, yeah?” Newt asks.

Thomas nods, when something else spikes in his brain and flashes cold and guilty through his heart like a crack of lightning.

“Her not knowing about you - that’s not-”

“Tommy,” Newt cuts him off with a half-laugh, “I was there when you finished your finals the first year of college and tried to call her only to find the old number had been disconnected. It’s okay. You guys will work it out - or you won’t - but what she knew before today doesn’t matter.”

“I love you,” Thomas tells him, because it’s the only thing left that he wants to say, even if it’s not new information to either of them.

It makes Newt smile, though, and his hand falls from the back of Thomas’ neck to his collarbone where he grabs hold of his t-shirt and pulls him forwards. Newt kisses him firmly, mouth moving with slow intent and Thomas feels himself start to go to pieces; his bones shattering to atoms.

Newt pulls back, and neither of them are even really breathless; not the way it’s so easy for them to get when they’re stealing each other’s oxygen. Thomas just curves towards him, feeling like the world’s a different shape.

“Netflix,” Thomas says, slightly raw. “Food will be a while and tomorrow Minho will fuck up all the profiles again.”

“I’m going to lock him out,” Newt says, even though they both know he never will.

Thomas kisses the side of his head and moves away.

Newt exhales behind him like a release, and says as Thomas ducks into the living room, like a prayer even though this is also not new information, “You’re home to me too.”


	2. Chapter 2

Newt has always liked watching Thomas drive.

There’s something about the concentration wired into him that’s a complete contradiction to the way he seems to do it easily, like he’s not thinking at all. He calculates the roads and gaps in traffic ahead of them in a way that isn’t math or science but more like intuition, and then he goes for them, fearlessly, no beat of hesitation. Newt’s seen him fit the old powder blue Jeep he owns through openings that it seems like it shouldn’t. He’s seen it accelerate away from cars it has no business out-stripping.

Sure, in some ways it’s just kind of fascinating to see him do it; spin the wheel under his palm whilst playing the clutch, fingers deft on the gear stick (stick shift, whatever). Mostly though, it’s just hot.

He’s doing it now. The airport traffic is a nightmare, as they’d expected it to be first thing in the morning on the twentieth of December, but Thomas has been weaving through three congested lanes and the Jeep just seems to squeeze itself wherever he points it.

This is most likely why Thomas got voted to pick Frypan up.

“Right there,” Brenda says from the back, and she launches forward between the front seats to point. “Terminal B.”

A Fiat moves up a space and an Audi is a beat too slow in lifting off their handbrake to close the gap. Thomas veers into it.

Brenda just barely manages to keep her balance, bracing herself between the headrests. “Jesus. Okay yes, here. Find somewhere. He’s already landed.”

They coast along with the line of traffic for not quite a minute, and then Thomas flings them into a space that’s just freed up. The Jeep has a high center of gravity and it often feels like it’ll tip when Thomas spins it so fast, but it never does. They’re all lurched in their seats as he stamps them to a stop and cuffs the parking brake up.

Brenda scrambles out first and Newt leans against the still warm hood of the Jeep as Thomas locks it and flips off the Audi that had been behind them.

“What?” Thomas asks, turning around and catching Newt smirking. His breath clouds in the cold air, the sting of winter catching at his voice.

Newt shakes his head, reaches up and fists the collar of Thomas’ shirt, pulling him forward. Thomas goes pliant when Newt kisses him, sinks forwards and grabs hold back. It’s familiar; a subtle shift in the weightless confidence he carries that’s like the base of his spine melts down, precious metal smelted out of ore. Newt’s kind of addicted to it at this point.

“You should drive more often,” Newt says to him, pulling away and then pushing him back.

Thomas’ pulse flickers in his throat and he sounds airless when he says, “I like it when you drive.”

“Oi!” Brenda shouts, and Thomas drops his head onto Newt’s shoulder with a faint groan. “Stop discussing who tops and move it. He’s at baggage claim.”

x

“How did you even get all this through customs?” Thomas asks, looking flummoxed, eyes on the heaving press of bags in his car.

The trunk of the Jeep is stuffed full. Frypan brought back three suitcases but one of them burst open while they were trying to crush it in. They’ve been scowled at by no less than fifteen cruising cars as they hurried to round up a bunch of kitchen equipment from the snow and slush asphalt.

“Easy,” Frypan pants, his breath a cloudy shiver in the air. He flings a stainless steel colander over the back seat and it frisbees somewhere into the rear footwell with a clang. “Told them who I work for. The name has its benefits. And the paperwork saying I was overseas on official business.”

He stuffs an electric whisk into a gap between an iron scale and a wok. Something else makes a popping sound underneath it all, a tiny racket of them like a bb gun firing off. They all freeze, warily eyeing the mass of luggage and when nothing else happens, and the noise dies down, Frypan nods.

“Okay, yeah, we’re good.”

Newt lifts an eyebrow. He’d seriously like to question how Frypan is defining ‘good’, but he pushes the rear door shut without a word. None of them ask.

“I call shotgun,” Frypan says happily, dusting off his hands. He’s barely made it two steps when Brenda snatches his arm.

“No you don’t,” she says.

Frypan swallows, expression twisting with realization and distaste. His skin is too dark to tell if he’s blushing but he does lift a hand to scrub through his close-cropped hair. “Right,” he says. “The eyefucking. The back is good too.”

Thomas’ eyes flicker away, and there’s a faint touch of colour in his skin, but he doesn’t look apologetic. It’s not like Newt hides it - not any more - and Thomas knows it.

They all pile into the Jeep, and Thomas inches forwards into the lanes of traffic crawling in the opposite direction. Newt watches him; the press of his hand at the apex of the wheel arch, firm right up to his shoulder and the slight part in his mouth as he rolls his tongue. Oncoming headlights rove through the windshield, blaze across his throat and down the ski slope of his nose but his eyes never flinch away, mapping between cars.

He spots the gap before any of them do - not that Newt has exactly been looking at the road - and spins them into it and then straight across into the next lane before he has to slow to a crawl.

Frypan lets out a whoop in the back, and when Newt looks around, smiling despite himself, its to see him and Brenda both gripping the overhead handholds for life. Brenda rolls her eyes at him and Newt shrugs, turning back to the front.

He’s always liked to watch Thomas. They should be used to it by now.

x

“I can’t believe you didn’t start with ‘Hey, Fry, nice to have you back, oh and by the way - my sister is in town’.”

Thomas winces, looking between Frypan and Teresa, who’ve just met for the first time on opposite sides of a Target shopping cart. They’ve barely made it out of the open lobby part of the huge store; stood in a spread out group around three carts as cheerful Christmas music plays through the speakers. It’s late, and dark, and the store reflects back in all the windows so it’s not even possible to see the snow has started up again.

“I’m sorry?” Thomas tries.

“How does ‘my sister is in town’ slip your mind?” Frypan bursts. “It was over an hour drive from the airport!”

“Yeah, but wasn’t Thomas driving?” Minho calls. He’s standing several metres off, Gally and Zart grouped around his shopping cart. “You didn’t go fetch him in Brenda’s two-door deathtrap, did you?”

Brenda spins the end of her cart into his with a vicious clatter. “Will you leave off my car?”

“We’re really going to call that a car?” Minho asks, shunting her back. “Thomas drove, though. There’s your answer.”

(Yeah, sue him, it’s kind of hard to think about his sister when Newt watches him like that).

Frypan smacks Thomas in the chest with the back of his hand, exasperated disapproval written all across his face. Thomas gives him a helpless wince of apology again and Frypan turns to Teresa. The smile he turns on her is warm, friendly, and Thomas would take offence if he didn’t have a point.

“Teresa, right? The sister from the photo? It’s so cool to meet you.”

“You too,” Teresa says, following the exchange dubiously. She sounds genuine, if distracted. “Does everyone know me from that picture?” She asks, glancing up at Thomas, but it’s Gally who answers.

“Pretty much.” He shrugs in a ‘what can you do’ kind of way.

Thomas sighs and his voice lowers as he says, “It’s just...been a long time.”

Teresa looks preoccupied, like she wants to ask more, but Thomas watches her bite it back, bury it for later. It’s an expression he knows well; there’s always been far more about her that she keeps on the inside and Thomas can only guess what it might be this time.

Does she want to know why, maybe?

If she does, she’s right that it’s not a conversation for right now.

She nods and smiles, agreeing with a strange weight, “Yeah, it has.” Then she pulls in a breath and shakes herself. “What are we doing, then?”

Thomas thinks he’s relieved.

“Yeah- Oi, Captain,” Thomas turns, calling out to Gally as Newt pulls up to them with yet another cart. “What’s the plan here?”

Gally stands to his full, ridiculous height and whistles.

A middle-aged woman over by a table of purses gives him a filthy look.

“Who has the fucking list?”

The woman blinks, her disdain turning to scandalised shock, and she drops three handbags before striding quickly away from them all, the rear wheel of her cart squeaking its disapproval all the way out of earshot. Gally doesn’t appear to have noticed.

“You gave it to me, Dickhead,” Minho says. “You gotta fucking swear that loud?”

“Eat my ass,” Gally tells him, snatching the folded up piece of paper. There’s a ring of coffee stained into the back, and it looks like it might even have been gnawed on.

“Right here?” Minho asks lightly. He steps forward, into Gally’s space and stretches up on the balls of his feet to kiss him. Gally, ever so slightly pink, kisses him back for a beat before pulling away.

“Can you focus?”

Minho raises his eyebrows. “I’m very focused. How about I blow you in the fitting rooms instead?”

Gally’s shoulders are a hard line of tension and he swears with a bitten viciousness that says he’s tempted.

“Seriously?” Thomas asks widely around the group. “And you call us bad?”

Frypan reaches for Thomas’ cart with his eyes squeezed shut and doesn’t reply. He catches it sideways and the wheels lock, the front end skidding around, making Teresa jump out of the way. “Is there such a thing as bleach for your ears?” he says, starting to push away from them with his head tipped back to the ceiling. “I need that.”

Brenda darts forward to grab the front of the cart and yank it away before it can plough over a mannequin display. “I have a four minute recording of my landlady screaming,” she offers. “Usually does the trick.”

Newt frowns over at her, though. He’s moved up next to Thomas since Frypan took his cart. “ _Why_ do you have a four minute recording of your landlady screaming?”

Brenda handwaves him away. “She just went off on the Robinski family upstairs the day she found out they were keeping a cat and I thought - just in case, you know?”

“No,” Newt replies.

“Aren’t the Robinskis the ones who Winston got his third cat from?” Frypan asks. He returns to them, eyes open and wearing a comically oversized chef’s hat with a clearance tag swinging from the cauliflower top. “Are they Russian? It sounds a little Russian.”

“They’re from Michigan,” Brenda says flatly. “But yeah; they couldn’t keep Cheyenne so they gave her to Winston.”

“Wait,” Minho calls over to them, and Thomas looks up, along with the others. “Cheyenne? That was her name?”

Teresa, looking between them all like she’s trying to keep up with three courts at Wimbledon says, “What’s wrong with Cheyenne?”

Gally snorts. “He renamed her Chernobyl.”

Frypan leans over the side of Newt’s cart towards her, glancing quickly left and right. “They told you he’s probably involved in the mafia, right?”

Brenda kicks his stolen cart into his legs. “If he is, maybe don’t talk about it in Target?”

“It’s ten at night,” Frypan winces. “The only people here are the ones without a life and no one to tell, people who slept all day to work off jet-lag and the actual mafia. Probably.”

“Can someone tell us what’s on the bloody list?” Newt groans.

He folds forwards over the handlebar of his cart, his body counterbalancing the weight of it. He’s stood evenly, though, so it’s not his leg playing up even though Thomas knows the cold and long day will probably stack against him eventually. He stretches out his back instead; sleek muscle shifting under his t-shirt and the nodules of his spine brushing up through the cotton. His dog-tags slide free of his collar and hang, swaying in the shadow he casts on the ground.

Teresa clears her throat. Thomas jumps his eyes up to her, finding a knowing, amused expression on her face that burns fondly. He shrugs. He’s not exactly sorry for looking, and it’s been years; he’s also somewhat past the point at being sorry just for being caught.

He has a boyfriend and he’s also really hot - of course he’s going to look. They’re lucky he didn’t actually touch - folded like that, he could so easily reach out to the back of Newt’s neck and just _press_. It relaxes him, and the sound he makes is-

“Okay!” Minho says, cutting off that thought for later. “Everyone take out your phones, we need a lot of shit and we’re splitting this up by section.”

x

They blaze through Target like bandits; divide and conquer style, crossing paths here and there and launching various things between the speeding carts. They get a couple of ugly looks from the late shift staff and some rather more sedate last minute shoppers, but it doesn’t do much to deter them. They’re a bunch of young adults who are in the early years of financial independence where they can justify buying a four foot singing Father Christmas just because they feel like it.

“Christmas is meant to be enjoyed - loudly - even at ...ten twenty-three at night,” Frypan says after a harried looking woman scowls at them for setting off all the battery operated dancing reindeer.

“Five more sleeps,” Brenda cat-calls from two aisles down, hands cupped around her mouth like a funnel. She’s sitting in one of their carts, and Zart doesn’t pause in pushing it past the end of the row and out of view, serenaded by an electronic wave of Jingle Bells.

“Not for insomniacs,” Thomas calls back. “Don’t sit on the crackers.”

Minho and Gally disappear for ten minutes (Zart finds their abandoned cart over by the tech aisle), Brenda snatches up the last box of angel lights and Frypan nearly starts drooling over a whisk set in the appliances section. They don’t get kicked out and they make it back outside not long past eleven, so it’s enough of a success.

Thomas finishes laying the last of the plastic bags into the footwells of the Jeep and turns to see Zart running back to the storefront. He has the four carts all piled together and drifting dangerously on the forming ice as he steers them like a sinking ship. Teresa blows across her hands and pulls her scarf back up over her nose while Frypan stamps in the brittle snow to bring feeling back into his feet. 

Gally slams the trunk of his car closed. “We still have to hit Cubs,” he says.

“The fuck for?” Frypan demands.

Brenda rolls her eyes. “No stuffing.”

“Too much info,” Minho teases.

Brenda elbows him and he folds clean in half. Gally bites the inside of his cheek, mouth twisting as he fights off a smile. Frypan’s eyes have gone round.

“No st-You were meant to get all the food already!” He tugs at his hair, head snapping between their two cars, parked side by side in the almost empty lot. They’re just at the edge of the pool of light from a nearby street lamp, and it casts a jaundiced glow across Frypan’s dark skin and the horrified look on his face. “All the good brands are gonna be gone.”

“It’ll be fine,” Gally waves at him, brows pulled into a furrowed line of annoyance.

Thomas honestly isn’t sure whose fault it is they don’t have all the food. He and Newt stopped on the way back from visiting his grandmother last week, so they know that they did their part. “Who was on stuffing duty?” he asks.

No one owns up. It’s not like he expected them to, either. There’s clearly enough guilt between them that no one leaps for a second time on the obvious innuendo, either.

Frypan sighs; a deep, soul-wrenching thing that pulls up right from his snow-caked boots. “Man, get in then,” he says, pulling open the back door of Gally’s car. “Let’s go before they shut.”

Thomas turns back to the Jeep and slams the rear door closed on the shopping haul. If they jet across the interchange they can get to Cub Foods and hopefully be done before they close in just under an hour.

Before he can reach for the handle at the front, Newt tucks up behind him. He’s a sudden presence, pressing close in a single, fluid motion that moves Thomas pliably into the side of the car where he goes still. The metalwork is bitingly cold under his flat palms, and it starts to soak into his jacket too, but he doesn’t move, attention disintegrating between that and the way Newt’s hands have burrowed into the front pockets of his jeans. They’re far too clever on him, far too knowing, far too close and still not close enough.

“Alright if I drive, love?” Newt asks; a sly, warm brush of words into Thomas’ ear. Teeth touch to his earlobe, barely there and Newt’s fingers flex inside the confines of the denim over his hips. Thomas feels the snag of his keys in the fabric as Newt’s finger hooks through the threaded loop.

Thomas breathes out a shiver and the window fogs up. “Do whatever you want.”

“Gross,” Brenda offers, though she’s smiling and her eyes spark with pointed fondness. She’s too used to it.

Newt snorts. He draws back, but his mouth presses, searing hot to the side of Thomas’ neck an instant before he’s gone completely. He pulls open the driver side door and lifts himself in, the keys between his fingers.

Thomas feels untethered, unspun and free falling inside his skin. He pulls himself away from the Jeep - tries not to think too much about the powder blue showing through a fine-dusted layer of frost where his body heat has melted it.

Brenda punches him in the arm, jars his brain back online, and then pulls open the rear door to fling herself across the back seat without disturbing all the bags taking up the leg room. Thomas watches Teresa slink in her wake, looking far more amused than should be allowed. She follows Brenda in, curling up on the seat and pulling the door shut.

Behind them, Zart has returned four carts less and the others are bundling into Gally’s car. Newt has already shifted the seat and mirrors in the Jeep and fired up the engine. His wrist hooks over the top of the wheel and his foot taps idly against the clutch. Thomas glances at his knee but swallows the question he doesn’t need to ask.

Newt wants to drive because working a manual transmission will stop his bad leg seizing up from the cold and the long hours moving on it. Thomas isn’t about to draw attention to that, particularly with the girls in the back seat. Knowing it is almost enough to shake off the lingering knotted feeling at the root of his spine, the memory of fingers in the crest of his hips.

“You suck,” he tells Newt soundly, having circled the hood to climb into the passenger seat.

Newt smirks ahead out of the windshield as he swerves out of the parking space to follow Gally’s tail-lights. He says, “Later.”

“Jesus,” Thomas mutters, letting his forehead drop onto the icy window as Brenda kicks the back of his seat.

x

They take a drive on the morning of the twenty-first.

Newt wakes up to an empty bed and finds Thomas in the kitchen, his hair a ruffled mess and still blinking blearily as he pours coffee into two thermal bottles. The glowing digits of the clock on the microwave say it’s just gone seven but already the light outside the windows is a sharp white glow. It’s still snowing, settling in drifts outside while swirling patterns of frost gather and blossom in the corners of the window panes.

They share a shower in the interest of taking less time, and it doesn’t wholly work. Still, Newt would rather put up with an extra hour of traffic on the freeway than give up the alternative. He’d rather keep the blazing memory of cold, slippery tiles under his hands, against his forehead; intoxicating dissonance to the silken heat and deep pull of Thomas’ mouth.

There isn’t much to be done for the early start, though. Thomas is being used because the Jeep is the only one of their cars cut out for the job and no one can leave without him. Once Brenda had tried to borrow the Jeep and it wouldn’t even start. Then, Newt learned two years ago he doesn’t like spending time away from Thomas over Christmas. So they’re both going.

Even at arse o’clock in the morning.

Minho bangs on the door loudly not half an hour later, carolling through the wood and bolts, and sounding brightly awake in a way that Newt envies to his core. He pulls the door open sharply and the brass number seven rocks warningly from it’s dodgy screw. Minho almost topples inside, face and outstretched knuckles first, and Newt stands back to watch it happen.

Minho might be his and Thomas’ best friend, but this appearance is entirely undeserving of sympathy.

“Stuff it with the noise,” Newt tells him, throwing a dish towel in his face. “No one is up right now. You ready?”

Minho throws the cloth onto the kitchen counter, eyebrows rising on his forehead. He’s in a thick jacket, fingerless gloves on his hands, and a dark green scarf that seems long enough for three people looped several times around his neck. His hair stands on end, like it’s being pulled away from his scalp by magnets in the ceiling.

He scoffs. “Ready to sit in a car with you two for two hours? Nope. Let’s go, Assholes.”

Thomas cuts around the archway from the living room and tosses Newt his phone. His hair is still damp as he grabs his leather jacket and catches the set of keys Newt throws his way. Minho grumbles all four flights to the ground.

Rock salt was scattered over the sidewalk by the apartment building weeks ago, and between all the tenants pitching in a shovel here and there, it’s kept it mostly clear of black ice. The road is not so cared for. It’s covered in a powdered carpet, there’s old snowfall banked by the curb and it’s too early for any new tire tracks to have etched into the asphalt. All the parked cars line the road, frosted up and snowed in like they’ve been draped in white muslin.

Gally waits, leaning against the Jeep and holding two of his own coffee cups. He hands one to Minho and gets a slightly filthy kiss in return. Newt is in sadly no position to protest, and Minho seems to know it, winding the arm holding his coffee around Gally’s neck even though he has to stretch. Thomas’ mouth still looks soft and swollen, eyes like sunlight through whiskey as he unlocks the car.

“Zart?” He asks, as they all file in and pull on their safety belts.

“Picking him up from the crossroads,” Gally says. “Apple maps?”

“Looked it up last night,” Thomas replies. Newt drove last night and he reaches down to move the seat back into place. “Might need the zipcode when we get close to find the parking but we’ll be good until we leave the interstate. Rope, cable ties, cash?”

“Twenty feet, pack of sixty and forty bucks,” Minho reels off, kicking at the trash bag Gally tossed in at their feet. “Everything we need for an abduction. Let’s go or we won’t be back until New Year.”

Thomas fires up the old engine, lets the spluttering surge of gas even out to a steady roll through the cylinders, and then stamps on the clutch. He knocks the gearstick (stick shift, whatever, some things Newt’s just going to keep) into reverse and they loop backwards out of the reserved tenant parking slot, leaving a black void in the snow behind.

They’re on the road for just over two hours from the moment they leave the apartment building to the moment they pull up in the National Forest.

The dense conifers with all the low slung branches, weighed down with surviving foliage stops the worst of the wind. Instead it’s cold outside the Jeep in a way that’s stagnant and settled. It doesn’t catch in their clothes and scrape through their lungs, it’s more of a slow weight that soaks in layer by layer. The air is slightly hazy with the cold and powdered snow; overbright with the drifts that throw back the weak winter sun.

“You good?” Thomas asks Newt quietly as he locks the Jeep up. Newt’s leaning against the rear wheel arch, waiting, because he always does, the cold a delicate burn in his lungs. He looks sideways at Thomas, tips his head back and nods.

“You shouldn’t worry so much,” he says, exhaling a breath that coalesces white and tangible.

“I don’t worry,” Thomas says plainly. He shifts, boxes Newt up against the side of the car and reaches - like he so often does - for the bead chain. He doesn’t tug on it. The dog-tags are pressed against Newt’s chest under layers of clothing, the beaten metal plates warm. Thomas doesn’t try to pull them loose, even though Newt knows he has a thing for that too.

He just hooks his fingers through the chain and lets his knuckles rest against the side of Newt’s throat.

He’s haloed in the pale, washed out blue light that filters through the trees, snowfall making the world glow like overexposed film, even in the middle of the forest.

“I don’t worry,” Thomas repeats. “I’m asking because I want the answer.”

Newt swallows, feels his own pulse shift under the weight of Thomas’ hand. Thomas isn’t the kind of person who ever said things he didn’t mean. He’s reckless, yes, impulsive too, but his instincts are solid and there’s always a calculated purpose, weighed risk, even when he moves without warning. When he says things like that, he doesn’t say them to deflect or mollify; he says them because they’re true.

Newt isn’t surprised he fell in love with him.

He tips his head forwards, rests it against Thomas’ and breathes gently in the liminal space between them. “I’m good,” he acquiesces. “Let’s go buy a bloody tree before anyone else gets banned.”

Thomas snorts, drawing away. He lets go of the chain and laces his fingers between Newt’s instead, tucking both their hands into his pocket. Ahead of them, Gally is giving Minho a piggyback ride and they’re twirling around in the fresh snow, scattering furrows of underlying dirt in messy arcs. Zart walks with his eyes on his phone and they’ll be lucky if he’s only downloaded two spreadsheets on the pros and cons of real Christmas trees. Newt tugs their hands and goes to catch up.

“I still have no idea how Winston got banned from the National Forest Christmas Tree Cull,” Thomas says, frowning.

Newt shakes his head. “Do you want to ask?”

x

“It’s a Christmas tree,” Gally says flatly. “How do you always make this complicated?”

“Nature made it complicated long before I got here,” Zart sniffs. “Look, it’s a simple question - do you want a fir, a pine, a-”

“We want a _tree_.”

“They’re all _trees_ , Gally.”

Gally throws up his hands. “Thanks so much for clearing that up. Can you just pick one?”

Minho hugs him from behind, tucking his fingers into the front pockets of Gally’s jeans and digging his jaw into his shoulder even though he has to reach a little to do it. Gally quiets, a huge rush of frustrated air leaving him in a single exhale.

“What’s the difference?” Minho asks.

Zart opens his mouth.

“Five words or less,” Minho adds.

Zart shuts it. His expression pinches as he considers, and then he tries again. “Branches, color, smell, species.” He hesitates, eyes flitting as he counts, and then adds, “Asshole.”

Minho takes it in stride. “Assholes on trees are a new one, I’ll give them that. I’d like a tree with one of those.”

Gally snorts. His annoyance is slowly bleeding out at a steady pace as he rests contentedly in Minho’s grip. “What, are you planning on fucking it?”

“More for the aesthetic.”

Then, a new voice, “This is the worst conversation you’ve ever had.”

They all spin around, silenced on the spot as Brenda walks up to them in a huge puffy parka jacket and a beanie. Her boots look like snow has started growing on them and her nose is pink from the chill.

“What-” Minho starts. “How-”

“Thought you were trusting us to get the tree?” Thomas asks her, biting on his tongue in the hopes of hiding his amusement.

She gives him an affronted look. “I do. I’m up here visiting my mother.”

Gally frowns and it’s possibly the flattest his eyebrows have ever been. “You don’t have a mother.”

“Sure, rub it in,” Brenda mutters without heat and Minho does something - probably pinches him - because Gally jumps.

“Did you _follow_ us here?” Minho asks narrowly.

“Please,” Brenda scoffs. “I left an hour before you did. No one can follow Thomas.”

Thomas leans in close to Newt’s ear to mutter, “Was that a compliment?”

He says, evenly between amused and dry, “Not likely.” To him it’s hot as hell watching Thomas drive circles around higher-powered cars, but he’s not sure Brenda meant it that way.

“Can we get back to the kind of tree we want?” Zart asks, expelling a groan into the sky. “It’s freezing.”

x

They make it back to Newt and Thomas’ apartment building hours later.

The others are crowded around the handrail at the fourth floor when they finally lug their tree into the stairwell. Even Teresa is there; must have arrived to wait at the apartment for them to return and followed the others out. A cheer goes up, echoing off the walls and metalwork and several other tenants holler indistinctly back. It’s hard to tell whether they approve or whether they want the new tree to kill them all in a freak accident.

(In some fairness, it’s always been hard to tell with Miss Daphne from 206 - Newt isn’t sure he’s ever actually seen her sober. She was certainly high as a kite and quite likely drunk too, the day after he and Thomas moved in and she promptly tried to set Newt up with her full-grown daughter. Thomas still finds it hilarious).

Right on cue, as the five of them stagger up to the second floor landing, hauling the tree between them like pallbearers with a misshapen coffin, Thomas’ eyes dart to the door and a smile crosses his face.

“Don’t,” Newt warns.

“Just wondering how she’s doing. If she’s gotten over you yet.”

Newt sighs. He knows he’s going to do it, so does Thomas. Based on the way Gally shuts his eyes like he’s praying for patience, he probably does too. So why disappoint?

Newt drops his corner of the tree and spins on Thomas, shoves him back into the wall and follows. That’s where Thomas catches him off-guard. He’s usually so easy to move; he goes warm and yielding, eyes molten like butterscotch, pulse speeding up to a chaotic flicker under his skin. It turns him on. 

Sometimes, though, he reacts.

He snatches Newt’s wrists, both in one hand with a lightning reflex that he doesn’t often break out when he’s not working. It never fails to make Newt’s heart trip over, losing beats when he does. One moment he’s pushing Thomas into the wall, the next his own back meets it, forcing his breath out in a way that has little to do with the impact. Thomas kisses him like he’s trying to burn himself in.

“For fuck’s sake,” Minho says, somewhere far, far away just behind them.

“This is that Scooby Doo lady’s fault,” Gally points out.

“Scooby Doo?”

“Daphne?” Gally checks in a clipped tone, like he’s wondering if he remembered wrong. “The one who tried to set Newt up.”

“Didn’t he tell her he was gay?” Minho asks.

“Well if he didn’t, she must have got the point somewhere in the last two years.”

Hopefully, Newt thinks, tonguing the seam of Thomas’ mouth. Still, it’s worth it for this little flash of possessiveness that surfaces under Thomas’ amusement at the whole memory.

There’s a creaking, cracking noise, then a bang and a jarring sound like the lash of rain and Thomas pulls away to suck in a breath. They both turn.

Gally is holding his hands up in surrender, eyebrows tilted alarmingly and mouth pursed in a ‘not me’ kind of way. Minho has plastered himself to the railing, his hair more on end than usual. Zart is nowhere to be seen and the tree has backslid down half a flight of stairs, laying sprawled amid a mess of conifer twigs and bark fragments.

“Did you just let it crush him?” Thomas asks in a tone of mild interest as he steps backwards, drawing Newt with him.

“I didn’t know he was still holding it,” Minho says with the same detached kind of intrigue. “We let go to wait for you two.” Then he leans out, looking up the stairwell and yells, “Get Jeff! Zart might be dead.”

“He’s what?” Sonya yells back. Her braid hangs down towards them, swaying as she leans out in horror. “What happened?”

“Thomas and Newt can’t keep their hands off each other and now we need to write an obituary,” Minho replies.

Half a flight down, the felled tree makes a groaning noise.

“Cancel that,” Gally shouts. “He’s alive. But still get Jeff.”

x

Teresa watches the chaos unfold once again, as the boys make it up to their floor. 

She’s been in Thomas’ world for less than three full days and while she can tell it’s full of so much love, loyalty and laughter, there’s something just a little frightening about how often this kind of thing seems to happen.

They bundle the tree through the door to the hallway and leave the stairs behind, then everyone helps drag it to the apartment and into the kitchen.

Zart is prodded into a bean bag with a cup of coffee. He swallowed a branch, apparently, and he’s still picking pine needles out of his teeth between raky coughs. Jeff hands him a cough sweet that may or may not be prescription even as he swears it won’t be missed and then promptly leaves again, as if that weren’t already worrying enough. Sonya starts delicately inspecting the tree, snipping off bits that stick out too much with a small pair of shears and Frypan goes over to the stove, starting to flick dials.

Thomas climbs his way nimbly over the treestump and into the living room and that’s the same moment that Brenda appears again, striding through the doorway they hadn’t gotten around to closing yet.

“So? What did you get?” she asks, tugging her scarf off and tossing it in the general direction of the coat hooks. “Tell me it’s a pine.”

“It’s not,” Newt says. His fingers press into his lower lip, treading patterns in apparent distraction. Teresa figures she can guess why; she saw enough.

Brenda freezes. “Dude, we needed a pine.”

“You only wanted a pine so you could copy that vine and send the video to Jorge.”

“I have a laminated photo of Chris Pine in the car waiting for this,” Brenda says. “When else am I going to use that?”

“You laminated it?” Thomas asks dubiously, leaning around the arch from the living room.

Brenda shoots him a dirty look and he throws up his hands, walking away. Teresa figures there’s more story there, given the photo’s existence didn’t seem to be any kind of surprise.

“What kind is it, then?” Harriet asks. She moves around the kitchen counter and gazes down at the tree taking up all the floor space.

“Well,” Zart says, “it was between this and a Cupressus Leylandii hybrid-”

“Bless you,” Sonya says.

“Wh- no, it’s the name of the- never mind.” Zart gestures to the lump of pungent pine needles and branches on the floor. “It’s a Blue Spruce.”

...So...not pine needles then? Teresa isn’t sure how that part works. Spruce needles?

“You were quicker than last year,” Frypan comments. He darts a wary look at Winston, who’s moved to help Sonya prune the branches a little, only he’s using a sharpened switchblade. “No...incidents?”

“Zart didn’t give anyone a business card,” Newt reports. “Or a lecture on proper pinecone preservation. No one got banned and we all made it back to the Jeep without a three mile detour.”

“It wasn’t well signposted last year,” Winston says quietly and it comes across rather like guilt-ridden guide dog’s puppy eyes after steering its owner over an open manhole.

“We did almost kill Zart in the stairwell,” Minho says pointedly.

Thomas shrugs all the way across the apartment, unapologetic. “Sorry, Buddy. Worth it.”

Zart spits a piece of bark into his mug and salutes him with it.

“Forget that - and what kind of tree it is,” Gally says, cutting between Newt and Frypan. Teresa keeps well out of his way. He’s pulled a toolbox from under the kitchen sink and he jumps over the branches to follow Thomas like he can’t even feel the weight of it. “Can we please just put it up?”

Sonya declares it good to go. Winston reluctantly puts his knife away and then there’s a group effort of lifting, hauling and sniping at each other as they manhandle it past the relocated couch and into the corner by the windowsill. Minho holds it upright, half lost in the leaves, while Thomas and Gally hammer it into the crossbase.

They back away cautiously, but it holds, only a little bit askew, just a couple of feet clear of the ceiling. Gally and Thomas high five. Frypan grabs a broom to whisk away the shed leaves. Teresa shifts out of the way and opens the kitchen cupboard for Winston to scoop the debris into the trash can.

Just as they finish clearing up, Jeff reaappears. He lets himself in through the front door that no one had gotten around to locking, and he strides past Harriet and Frypan to drop a full paramedic emergency pack across the kitchen counter.

“Okay,” he says. “I brought the intubation kit just in case. Now we can decorate.”

Frypan prods at the thick tubing with something resembling nausea on his face. “When we said ‘first aid’ we meant band aids and tweezers not…”

Jeff snatches what looks like a turkey baster away from him. “Well I’m not shoving it down your throat so calm down.”

Harriet whistles and her eyebrows flicker with some complicated, inhuman muscle control. Jeff goes pink - an interesting flush to his brown skin tone - and clears his throat thickly.

“So,” he says, an octave too high, “Where do we start?”

“Pick a box,” Newt says, picking up the first one on the stack by the armchair and starting to line them up in front of the couch.

Teresa slips around it to check them out, eyes roving over the scrawled sharpie on the sides saying what’s what. There’s one that says ‘tree D’ another that says ‘Deck the walls’ and a third that just has a drawing of a sleigh on it. One is unmarked, one is half crushed and spilling confetti as Thomas sets it on the floor. One of the boxes is wrapped up in radioactive yellow caution tape.

“Split up,” Newt says to the room. “Pushpins are in the can on the kitchen counter, no stabbing stuff into door frames. Coffee’s in the pot, food in the fridge - until Fry says supper’s ready, and if anyone even thinks the word mistletoe I throw your presents into the fire.”

(“Your fake-ass fire couldn’t handle it,” Minho says, and it goes ignored.)

Sonya’s face falls. There’s a spray of the opalescent white berries - all glassy and fake - between her fingers, held aloft over Harriet’s head.

Teresa can’t help smiling, and she catches the eye roll Newt makes before he rubs wearily at his forehead like this is an old argument.

“Fine. One,” he allows. It might have something to do with the way Thomas moves close behind him, kissing his cheek on the way to the kitchen.

Sonya beams. So does Harriet for that matter, as she grabs the hem of Sonya’s sweater and pulls her easily off her feet, into her lap. Sonya folds into her, laughing, the sound quickly cut off and swallowed as Harriet kisses her. Harriet’s hands lift to cup Sonya’s face, sliding backwards to loosen her braid even more. There’s something so very tender about the way Sonya responds in return; an index finger curled and touched just under Harriet’s chin with all the weight of a feather. It keeps her head canted back, even though it’s clear she’s not using any pressure at all. It’s kind of beautiful.

Neither of them even notice, too burrowed into each other, when Thomas snatches the mistletoe sprig from Sonya’s distracted fingers, flinging it across the room to Newt. “Enough of that,” he says.

Minho gives him a look of affected insult. “You carry on worse.”

“I meant the mistletoe,” Thomas says shoving him on the way past and being nearly tripped up in retaliation. “They can do that all they want.”

Teresa glances away from the two girls making out on the couch. She looks Newt’s way, but he’s already hidden the offending plant.

“What do you have against it?” Teresa asks before she can stop herself. She doesn’t remember Thomas being so opposed before she left home - they’d had it around the house, one year even the real stuff before one of the younger kids got sick. “It’s tradition, isn’t it?”

“It’s also poisonous,” Zart says solemnly.

Teresa can remember the hospital trip. She knew that.

Brenda snorts, not looking up, elbows deep into the box marked ‘Deck the walls’. “Alright, Luna Lovegood.”

“I didn’t even say the word Nargles this time,” Zart protests, and he twists on his beanbag to grab a cushion and launch it at her.

She just barely ducks it and throws the first thing in reach back - a little wooden reindeer with a missing leg. It sails like a javelin, defying all aerodynamics, and clocks Zart over the eye. Jeff lets out a pitiful noise from the corner, like a wounded animal.

“Stop trying to kill each other - we don’t have the NHS like Newt.”

Newt’s eyebrows go up but he doesn’t say anything to interject. Gally, draping one of their new boxes of angel lights around the tree, keeps his back firmly to the room, but he’s laughing - the soft quake to his shoulders gives him away. Teresa wonders if it’s unfair to him to find it odd that he can laugh like that when he always looks so serious.

“Get to work,” Winston cuts in finally. He’s collecting hanging decorations on his fingers, lining them up from their little ribbon loops so they jangle together from his splayed hand like marionettes. “I got to go see the Boss before dark.”

It effectively gets everyone moving. Teresa folds herself down next to the box Brenda is unpacking, and finds herself quickly holding armfuls of colored streamers, trying to keep them uncoiling as Thomas and Minho start running the ends across the room.

Teresa’s phone chimes a couple of hours later, the sun finally starting to bleed pink through the living room windows as it falls out of the sky.

It’s Aris.

_Let me know your plans? I’ve got a pizza and an oven and I need to know if you want in._

Aris doesn’t exactly have family; not one he’s ever wanted to remember, anyway. When Teresa had tentatively suggested in the days before their last class of the year that she wanted to fly out to see her brother, he’d leapt on the offer to keep her company. He hadn’t wanted to intrude, and been happy enough to wander the city and get some space away from their usually manic lives.

She does feel a little guilty now, though. He’d never hold it against her if she said she was staying - he’d be glad for her. He’s content being apart from people in a way that most of the population isn’t. Still.

She texts back: _Count me in. See you soon._

So just as Winston and Jeff are gathering their coats and the unused paramedic pack - he’s leaving before it gets dark, as he said, only Teresa hadn’t been picturing a precise ‘moment of sundown’ type deal - she also stands up.

Thomas catches the movement from the corner where he’s balanced on an actual trampoline (apparently Brenda hadn’t been joking about that because she’d rolled it on its side out of storage closet like she’d brought it over early in readiness). He lowers his arms from the ceiling, a shimmering paperchain sagging in his fingers.

“You going?” he asks her.

She smiles tentatively, not really sure how she feels about it. She’s been accepted into this little fold of friends in a way she had no way of anticipating when she first knocked on the door two days earlier. She remembers seeing the crooked seven sat beside the four and the one and the anxious, crawling feeling of not knowing what would be on the other side.

But it’s also a process on its own - learning to replace the corroded memories of her childhood with the Thomas that’s living and breathing right now.

“Yeah,” she says, waving to them all. “The friend I came out with - I’m going to see him and hang out a bit.”

“Is he on his own?” Sonya asks, something luminous in her green eyes. “This close to Christmas?”

“He likes it that way usually,” Teresa says reassuringly.

Sonya’s gaze jumps across the room, and Teresa sees Thomas and Newt share a look, a tiny shrug, and then Sonya straightens up. “He should come,” she says, “on Christmas day. Only if he’ll be comfortable, obviously - and he could leave any time but...let him know?”

This is where Teresa starts to really think that it’s not even about her being Thomas’ sister. They didn’t welcome her because he knew her; they just did it because they’re the kind of people - the kind of family - who pick up strays and keep them; give them a place to thrive.

She smiles again, a little overwhelmed, and promises she’ll ask. She grabs her coat and says she’ll see them tomorrow before letting herself out and going to catch the train to the bnb.


	3. Chapter 3

“It looks good,” Teresa says, when she steps into the apartment past Newt on the evening of the twenty-third. “Considering I know how close it came to a massive death count to get it done.”

Newt smirks. His hair looks wet and his skin is pink, something sharp and glittering about his eyes. He’s wearing a pair of jeans with a smear of paint or bleach across the legs along with a knitted sweater. The sleeves are rolled up, gathering loosely halfway down his forearms and there’s a braided leather cuff knotted around his right wrist.

He shuts the door behind Teresa, and then turns to glance around the room.

“A little maiming and mangling,” he shrugs. “But no one died.”

“And that’s a success?”

“For us it is. Hang up your stuff, come on in. The others will be here soon.”

Teresa shrugs off her long coat and finds it an empty hook. There’s a large number of wall hooks for such a small apartment, and while Thomas and Newt have filled a couple each with various jackets, many of them are bare. It’s more signs that their life here really is cut out and designed for the presence of other people; their friends a permanent fixture.

The rest of the apartment is a testament to that too.

They finished all the decorating after she left.

Various things have been put up with no apparent cohesiveness; they criss-cross over each other, intercepting and overriding, almost like someone set off a stick of dynamite in the box and let things stay wherever they landed. There’s a dissonant mesh of tastes from the precisely pinned garlands in the kitchen (Sonya and Frypan) to the haphazard loops of paper chain strewn around the windows (mostly Zart). The tree is more popcorn, tinsel and hanging ornaments than it is leaves (Minho) and the angel is a repurposed garden gnome that Harriet stitched wings onto. The colors clash, often hideously and nothing hangs quite straight.

(“What was that?” Frypan had shouted back from the top of a stool the day before.

Minho had jabbed a thumb back at Jeff. “Picasso here thinks it sucks.”

“I said it was uneven,” Jeff protested as Frypan spun on him in accusation, his loop of tinsel drooping sadly towards the floor.

Newt had crept past, weaving between Minho and Teresa. “I don’t think Picasso has a lot of room to judge anything uneven,” he had said.

“You want to do it?” Frypan huffed, holding out the end of tinsel as well as a pushpin.

Jeff couldn’t say no fast enough, hurrying away to hang stockings from the back of the couch, muttering the whole time about the number of injuries every year caused by unbalanced stools.

And, really, that was a fair summary of how most of the evening had progressed before Teresa had left them. She hadn’t expected it to improve).

Teresa has always been used to the delicate and tasteful decorations her parents favor; yearly color themes that were never too garish or opulent, but accented the rooms. Sprays of frosted holly and boughs of Canaan fir were draped over the mantelpiece, loops of plush tinsel around the doorways and tiny angel lights woven into the handrails on the stairs. Potpourri soaked into dried petals, pinecones and horse chestnuts permeated the halls from little glass bowls on the windowsills. They burned sage and cinnamon candles in the dining room during meals.

It was what she and Thomas and their younger siblings had gotten used to, and Teresa liked it - she liked the elegance of it. The house felt like the holidays in a way she could breathe in without being suffocated.

This apartment, though - this has broken all natural laws, crammed together a motley family of people and placed (thrown) touches of each of them in it. It feels festive and busy and lived in and it works for all the same reasons it shouldn’t.

Newt gestures over his shoulder as he turns the deadbolt and then kicks two pairs of snow-caked boots along the wall until they tuck under the hanging jackets. Brenda’s trampoline is propped there too. “Drinks in the fridge if you want one,” he says, “or Thomas was just getting dressed if you wanted to talk to him.”

Teresa raises an eyebrow at him. It’s four in the afternoon.

Newt interprets her silent appraisal exactly as it’s intended and just gives her a put-upon look in return that isn’t totally a denial.

“We had a snowball fight. He was in the shower,” he says. He moves across the kitchen to the door tucked into the corner of the wall and knocks gently. “Tommy? Teresa’s here.”

There’s a muffled clatter and then the door pulls open.

Thomas steps through, just pulling a t-shirt over his head. (He’s not quite fast enough to hide the hickey that’s branded vividly into the bar of his collarbone - not to mention the others dotted across him, varying in age, some just smudged shadows - but Teresa pretends she didn’t see any). He smiles and comes across the kitchen to give her a hug.

“Hey ‘Resa,” he says softly into her hair.

She forgot what that was like, and now it hits like a solid punch to the chest just how much she missed it. She squeezes her eyes shut and her fingers crunch into fresh cotton as she reaches instinctively.

He’s taller than she remembers.

She knew, that, of course, it’s just that she also hadn’t really consciously thought about it until now; feeling how much height he’s gained on her as she tucks her arms around his waist to hug him back properly. That makes sense, though. This is the first time he’s hugged her in over five years; closer to seven, since he didn’t really hug her after she left the first time, two years before he’d split in the other direction. She doesn’t know if he’s realized that as well or not.

He lets her go a moment later and scoops up a flannel shirt that was draped over a chair.

Newt hopped up onto the kitchen counter when Teresa wasn’t looking. He sits there, easily slouched and his fingers flickering across the screen of his phone, legs swaying above the linoleum. Thomas moves around the counter towards him and Teresa watches the gentle way he curves his fingers over Newt’s left knee before laying a kiss on the side of his head that’s fleeting and almost playful.

The juxtaposition of is what does it; what makes the reality of them really sink in. It’s the expressive intimacy of Thomas’ hand on Newt’s knee and then the way the kiss is like a glancing afterthought that pulls a smile in its wake. Teresa’s only seen them interact in moments over the past few days, and it’s always been clear that they’re serious about each other but this is somehow more. There’s such a startling versatility to the two of them and it feels almost too intrusive to watch.

They stand close together until they’ve fixed up the iPhone dock and it’s started a vibrant pulse of Christmas music. 

“Hide the CDs,” Newt says, hopping down and kissing Thomas’ shoulder as he sweeps past.

“Already under the floorboard,” Thomas replies.

Teresa doesn’t know the context, but her blank expression must get Thomas to take pity because he says, “Brenda. She grew up with her Adoptive father, Jorge and neither of them believe in any kind of music that doesn’t come on vinyl.”

Teresa raises an eyebrow and nods to the dock where Newt’s phone now rests. It’s surrounded in green tinsel and plastic holly.

“Reluctant exception,” Thomas admits. “Do us a favor and don’t point it out to her.”

Teresa presses her lips so she doesn’t laugh and Newt reappears with armfuls of gifts.

Thomas starts digging in the storage closet and throws several rolls of wrapping paper and a tape dispenser into the middle of the living room carpet. (The tape lands with a hollow thunk and someone from the floor below bashes their ceiling in response.) Teresa passes out beers and helps by hooking up the laptop so that they can stream Netflix while the boys squirrel away their presents.

She thinks of them like poetry again, or a tidal river with an ebb and flow. Thomas’ sense of humor is the same thing it always was, and Newt tunes into it easily. Shared jokes blend into domestic exchanges over where they left something or when they need to pay a water bill and then shift gears into cussing out their friends.

Teresa breathes in all of it - from the lopsided Christmas tree to the two of them sniggering as they wrap up a mop bucket in the most obvious shape they can. This is all she could have ever wanted for Thomas. It’s a bittersweet knowledge that she couldn’t be there for it to happen, but she’s proud of him, happy for him enough that one day it won’t even matter that she missed the beginning.

Newt takes a call from someone called Alby for five minutes, and he reports back, “he didn’t flake. Caught a flight half hour ago.”

“There’s a layover, there’s still time,” Thomas says with feeling.

Neither of them stop to explain it.

They pack off most of their parcels out of sight again just in time for the usual faces to start trickling in.

Sonya and Harriet come from upstairs with their own blankets and pillows; Brenda brings several dips, packets of chips and a mysterious flask. Minho and Gally look like they got waylaid, if their ruffled clothes and hair are anything to go by. (“Risky,” Brenda comments placidly. “That’s the last thing you want to get frostbite.”) Zart shows up like Father Christmas - lugging an enormous trash bag of gifts inside with him. Frypan brings a lasagne in a large casserole dish and he’s still wearing a pair of mismatched oven mitts when Harriet opens the door for him. (“Did you walk here with those on?”) Winston and Jeff arrive last even though they live closest, which seems to be pretty standard as well.

They crack on with a wrapping party, music fluttering along in the background as they squabble over the paper, and Netflix muted as they flick between cheap supernatural dramas and A Nightmare Before Christmas.

“Oh! I like this one,” Sonya calls from her beanbag (the one that says Lapp Dances $2). She waves through to the kitchen. “Crank it up?”

Teresa shifts, but Thomas is closer, and he leans over to turn the volume dial. It’s well into the evening and the two of them have retreated to the slightly quieter barstools in the kitchen to get more drinks.

“We danced to this last year, remember?” Sonya asks Harriet with hazy warmth, leaning back so she can catch her girlfriend’s eyes upside down. “In the street outside the school.”

“I remember you almost slipped on the ice and all your students nearly called an ambulance,” Harriet says.

“They’re good kids,” Sonya agrees.

“Schoolteacher?” Teresa asks Thomas quietly, not wanting to interrupt as she tips her head towards the two girls.

He nods back.

Teresa glances around them, at the soft burn of all the angel lights in a steady glow from the tree, and pinned around the edge of the ceiling. It’s warm and serene and slightly off against the pacy beat of the music they’ve just raised. “We should change up the lights,” she says. “Get them all flashing and fast like we used to - give them something to dance to again.”

Thomas smiles, but his head is already shaking. “Nah. We leave them on like this.”

Teresa frowns. She has years of memories from their childhood home, always messing with the settings on the Christmas lights to make them as wild as possible, throwing disco patterns on the walls in the dark. Thomas doesn’t look sad, but it’s different and Teresa’s not sure if she’s allowed to ask.

It’s a small wash of relief when he continues softly, “Minho’s eyes get sensitive to the flashing, and it’s not good for Newt, either.”

Teresa thinks of the dog-tags she’s seen Newt wear; the tiny symbol of the entwined snakes around the staff, and wonders if ‘not good’ means he just doesn’t like it, or if it means something more. She doesn’t ask that, and this time Thomas doesn’t offer it.

Teresa drops it, reminding herself firmly that it’s not her place, and nods towards Sonya again. “So. Schoolteacher.”

Thomas’ eyes soften, perhaps relieved, and he seems grateful for the shift in topic as he looks over at her and Harriet, now trading butterfly kisses upside down. “Yeah. Fourth grade. She’s great with kids.”

“She doesn’t want her own yet?” Teresa smiles.

“Not until Harriet’s ready,” Thomas says. “She works for the FBI so it’s a bit fast paced to juggle a kid. They’re happy; just the two of them.”

Teresa can’t quite help her mind reeling and whatever lingering questions she had over Newt disintegrate. “The FBI?”

Thomas blinks. “Oh shit, you didn’t know?”

She shakes her head blankly.

He almost seems to laugh, hand rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s okay, she doesn’t have to keep it quiet or anything - it’s not quite that high profile. I guess we’ve all been pretty busy with everything else.”

“What about the others, then?” Teresa asks, and she settles more comfortably on her stool, leaning onto the counter. “Can you tell me?”

Thomas gestures with the bottle of water he’s been drinking. “Gally’s in architecture, you know about Jeff by now. Brenda kind of has a lot of jobs; most of them involve making men feel inadequate. It suits her.” His tone is rich with fondness and it makes sense, given what she already knows about their close friendship over the last five years. “Fry works for this guy with some crazy french name. He graduated top of his program and was hired more or less while he was still in his cap and gown.”

“What about Minho?” Teresa’s burning to know. “Something fun and wild?”

“Depends how you define it,” Thomas says, smirking. “He works with the military at a bomb testing facility. He was headhunted out of college because of his aptitude for it - insane science grades and out of the box thinking, other stuff like that. He and Gally used to joke that what Gally built, he’d blow up but the point is more about how to avoid the explosions.”

“Not what I expected,” Teresa mutters, and tips back a mouthful of the cheap beer. It might possibly answer why he doesn’t like flashing lights, at least.

“Never is,” Thomas agrees.

“You and Newt, though?” She rests the bottle back on the counter between her hands. “What did you decide to do?”

“Newt works with troubled kids in the social system,” Thomas says.

“Therapy?”

“Not exactly,” Thomas’ eyes are a strange, stirring mix of proud and hot as he glances through to his boyfriend - currently using the finished inner tubes of used up wrapping paper to duel against Frypan. “It’s more helping them find outlets between therapy sessions, stepping in when things go bad, getting them out. Not everyone gets lucky; he always said he wanted to be there for those kids. I’ve seen him break down doors and he once punched a guy almost three times his size in the face for leaving a bruise on a ten year old.”

Teresa raises her eyebrows. She can’t help it - she’s impressed. It’s not what she’d expected when she met Newt, or in any moment after. His wiry physique; tapered and lean like a runner, doesn’t really imply any huge amount of strength, even though there’s subtle hints of it in the shape of his jaw, the tendons inside his wrists.

Thomas’ attention has wandered, watching the sword fight happening over the back of the couch, tongue curled in the corner of his mouth.

Teresa snorts. His eyes snap back to her.

“You like it,” she says, entertained, so happy for him it hurts.

He shrugs. “It’s hot.”

She moves on, because she’s happy for him but she doesn’t really want to hear the specifics. “What do you do, then?”

Thomas hesitates, clears his throat with a touch of what might be bashfulness and then shrugs. “Bail enforcement agent,” he says.

Teresa sits, processes, feels condensation roll down the side of the bottle in her hands. The words trip through her brain again, falling over each other, changing shape.

“You’re a bounty hunter?”

Thomas makes a twisted face that’s a little bit of a wince and a little bit of a smile. “That sounds way more dramatic but...yeah, kinda.”

Teresa gapes. “You-but- How?”

He shrugs. “Just sort of fell into it, really. Accidentally threw some asshole over a cop car a couple of years back after chasing him four blocks for taking Mrs Grady’s phone. They said he’d slipped bail and offered me a job.”

“So you work with the cops?”

“I’m not on their payroll,” Thomas says. “But sort of. I get to carry handcuffs.”

Something about his expression tells her that he’s not happy about that for a reason that relates to doing his job.

“Ew,” Teresa mutters, and Thomas laughs.

“Come on,” he says, and finally moves, lowering the volume again on the docking station now the song has slid onto the next.

He heads back to the living room, and the spot he abandoned, passing the rest of the water bottle to Newt.

Teresa sinks into the armchair again, quietly content but also a little mind-spun with everything she’s learned.

The conversation filled most of the gaps, and it’s also possibly the most she’s really learned about Thomas’ life away from the apartment. It’s strange how it feels like it doesn’t matter nearly so much. What he does isn’t a huge part of him the way her biology program and career hopes feel like they’re breathing in her; already integral to her identity like blood and the color of her eyes. Who he is exists here.

It feels kind of like she’s gotten all the puzzle pieces that matter; enough to fill in a picture and see it, even if there’s gaps; things she doesn’t know and might never learn. The only thing she really realizes she’s missing is an origin story.

So as Nightmare Before Christmas comes to an end, all of them curled up in beanbags and cushions in the living room under the steady glow of angel lights, she asks.

“How did you two even meet?”

She directs it across the room at Newt and Thomas.

Thomas is sat on the floor, wrapping up gifts with Brenda, Frypan and Harriet. There’s plenty of rolls of paper left, but only two pairs of scissors and the single tape dispenser. Thomas and Brenda seem to have a flowing system of swapping and exchanging going as their present stacks grow but Frypan and Harriet can’t seem to fit into it. There have been a few squabbles over the scissors and Frypan has several pieces of tape stuck up his arms where Harriet and Thomas have been taking retribution for stolen resources.

Newt is sitting on the end of the couch, Thomas more or less against his legs, and he’s writing in a small pile of Christmas cards. He’s left-handed; it’s the first time she’s seen him write.

Both of them look up, as though they can tell they’re being addressed, but they’re both slower than Minho. He’s curled around Gally on the opposite end of the sofa, Gally slouched down so he can fit into the space between Minho’s arms that exists for him.

“Oh pick me,” Minho says, sitting up straight and actually rubbing his hands. “This is a good one.”

Gally smirks, sinking deeper between Minho and the cushions, and says, “But where do you start?”

“The library,” Minho says decisively.

“What?” Newt asks, but Minho has already begun.

.

.

.

It was the first day of college and the turn of Fall was spreading greedy fingers for all the trees on campus; leaching the chlorophyll-rich shades of green from the leaves. It wasn’t quite cold yet, not the way it promised to be, but even so; morning frost had started to gather in the window panes and turn the grass brittle. The library was a big, domed building off to the side of campus; a hotspot during midterms and finals, but usually bare and silent so early in the semester.

Thomas let himself in before classes began, making his way up the stairs to the second level and heading for his usual table at the back by the philosophy section.

His usual table was taken, though, and he couldn’t help but stop and stare. He was a total stranger - probably wearing a worn pair of fingerless gloves along with that old sheep’s wool jacket - his lean frame reclining back in the seat with a book. His hair had been abused by the wind, a cup of tea still steaming by his elbow - because of course it was fucking tea. He’d looked up, startled by Thomas’ approach, and his breath caught, hearts leaping in tandem, their eyes colliding like a thousand tiny colliding thin-

“-Ow!”

Minho breaks off his dramatic tale with a shout as Newt kicks him in the shin.

“Fucking pri-”

“You had that coming,” Newt cuts over him, looking somewhere between amused and disturbed.

“I was making a story of it,” Minho grouches. He’s still rubbing at his leg and Gally bats his hands away, taking over almost absently, trying to hide a smirk against the back of the couch.

“We didn’t even meet for the first time in a library,” Thomas says. He’s stopped wrapping presents and its upset the rhythm of their tape and scissor exchange. Harriet has both now and Frypan has started to pick all the pieces off of his arms. Brenda has borrowed Winston’s switchblade.

“Not important,” Minho handwaves, apparently getting over the pain now that Gally is showing sympathy - however exasperatedly. “If you let me go for five more minutes I could have had you screwing in the Astrology section.”

“Uh,” Thomas says eloquently, at a loss.

“It was the Agriculture section,” Newt says and Minho’s gaze snaps up to him.

“Not for two more years, though,” Thomas adds.

Then he startles himself, shooting a look across the room to Teresa with a wince of apology.

She smirks and shrugs back. Okay perhaps hearing about her brother’s sex life isn’t exactly the topic she’d choose, but she is glad for getting to see him comfortable and open and having the same kind of conversations he’d have if she weren’t there. It feels like she’s being really let in, rather than being shown a facade, and that’s worth it to her.

Besides, she did ask and perhaps she should have figured that with this group, she wouldn’t quite get the G-rated version of events that he might one day deliver to their parents.

Still, just to hold her own, she says, “The go-to place on our campus was the Creative Arts section. It wasn’t exactly that kind of school and it was the only corner the cameras didn’t cover. You could see the religion section from there though, so you always knew when the students were using it because the Bibles were all turned face down.”

Thomas stares at her. So does half the room, actually. Harriet looks vaguely approving.

“Oh. My god,” Frypan says, each word hanging suspended as he gets them out.

Teresa adds, “Someone tried to use the microfiche room once. Turns out they have cameras in there too.”

“Hm, ours doesn’t,” Gally says.

All the heads spin again and this time Brenda throws a roll of wrapping paper at him like a javelin. It unrolls as it sails through the air and Gally watches it drape over him like a sparkly blanket before giving her a bland look.

“No way,” Brenda says. “Those are old documents.”

“I know,” Minho says, smug. “History really does it for him.”

The paper over Gally rustles and Minho jumps. Teresa doesn’t want to know.

“Documents aren’t offended by a bit of screwing around,” Gally shrugs.

Brenda almost chokes. “No, you hussy, they’re fragile to like…atmosphere.”

(“I’m picturing the car scene in Titanic so much more than I’m comfortable with,” Zart whines into a bag of chips. Jeff pulls a face. Teresa can’t even begin to guess which part of this is putting him off the most.)

Gally lifts both eyebrows, unrepentant, and Brenda groans, dropping her face into both hands. She almost brains herself with the switchblade she’s still holding and Thomas reaches out to pluck it away from her.

“So,” he says slowly, flicking it closed and setting aside now that the pile of presents left to wrap has dwindled down to a few stray ones between them. “It’s actually a little-” he darts Minho a glance “- a lot - different, but if you want to know?”

Teresa shifts herself in the armchair, curling her legs up to settle comfortably. “Yes, I want to know.”

Sonya reaches out and smacks the lid of the laptop closed, killing the TV feed on a dramatic shot of a full moon. She shrugs at them all as she sits down in Harriet’s lap and opens a packet of Reese’s Cups.

“What? This is better than Netflix. I’ll make popcorn when we reach the bit with the bonfire.”

x

Thomas is woken late on the morning of the twenty-fourth by the all-too-recognizable sound of a ruckus at the apartment door.

He swipes at his eyes and sits up, stretching his spine forwards. His bones still feel malleable and weighed with sleep, dreams unspooling in the slow patter of his heart and bruises pulsing gently like they’ve been sucked deeper than skin. He grabs for a pair of flannel pajama pants, tugging them on before he fully leaves the warmth of the comforter.

Newt shifts as he moves away, still fast asleep, shoulders curved forwards around the space Thomas left. The chain of his dog-tags spills across his neck, pooling under the pillow. Thomas reaches out, fingers soft as he settles them on the side of Newt’s head. The blinds are pulled at the window, but the pale sky glows through, diffused in a way that doesn’t cast sharp shadows. The room is gold and muted like a watercolor painting, Newt warm and unguarded, folded into the blankets and pillows. Thomas’ thumb brushes back and forth over his temple.

Newt exhales, slow and quiet but he doesn’t stir.

Thomas retreats, shivering just a little as he slips through the bedroom door and pads across the kitchen. Their heating is good, but it’s still the middle of a snowy winter and he’s just left the warmth of a shared bed.

“Yeah, yeah, shut up,” he mutters at another clatter, pulling back the bolts on the door. “What are you even-”

He pulls it open and has to drop his eyeline by a good few feet.

“Chuck?”

Chuck beams up at him; his dark curls unruly and flecked with fresh snow, cheeks ruddy with cold, and trying to balance a huge casket of bottles in his arms. He’s twelve now - Thomas first met him at Gally’s house four years ago and in some ways he’s much the same as that eight year old, but in other ways, he’s grown a lot.

“Hi, Thomas!”

He adjusts the box, still smiling ear to ear as a pair of mittens sway from pieces of thread disappearing into the sleeves of his puffa jacket.

“Um-” Thomas says. He shakes himself, stumbling backwards to clear the way. “Hi, Chuck. What’s-I mean-”

Chuck giggles, making his way inside and stretching to place the box on the kitchen counter. Thomas lurches to help him before it over-balances.

“Gally sent me ahead,” he says. “He’s bringing more crates - one of them isn’t even store-bought.”

Thomas feels the confusion melt away as he plucks one of the bottles up by its neck to check the label. Eggnog. He drops it and lifts the one next to it instead. Ginger Beer. They’re all different; an assortment of beverages ranging from distinctly alcoholic to couldn’t make a mouse tipsy. They’re all branded, though, and he knows by experience what ‘not store-bought’ means.

Thomas turns to Chuck, who’s rubbing his hands together. “He brought your Grandpa’s moonshine?”

Chuck nods offhand, “Yep. Hey, dude, were you beat up?”

Thomas blinks, processes and- “Oh, uh-”

Fuck. He didn’t pull on a shirt, and whatever tact Teresa might have for ignoring Thomas and Newt’s version of Advent - Chuck quite patently lacks.

Chuck’s laughing, though, and Thomas stops panicking about it to cuff him over the head instead. “Shut up.”

It doesn’t stop him laughing, even as he grapples back, and Gally appears in the open doorway with two more crates.

“Jesus, put some clothes on.”

Thomas raises a cool eyebrow at Gally’s heavy winter jacket as Chuck lifts himself onto a stool. “I live here,” Thomas replies. “What’s even with the delivery?”

Gally shoulders past him to drop the crates. His jacket is freezing cold and it bursts along Thomas’ bare skin, lifting goosebumps, making his heart skitter. He shudders and backs out of the way.

“Mom ran out to see a friend last minute,” Gally says, leaning against the counter and looking a little smug at the wide berth Thomas has left him. “Grandpa called and said to come over quick so he could load up the moonshine before she caught us. Figured I’d drop it here instead of lugging it over tomorrow. Sorry,” he adds, with a touch of actual, sincere apology.

Thomas shrugs it off. “And….?” he half asks, tipping his head towards Chuck, who’s plucking at their tinsel.

“Jumped in the car,” Gally grumbles, back to his usual tone and shooting his brother a look of fondly rooted sibling annoyance. “I gotta get him back to Mom’s before she beats us there and realizes he’s gone.”

Thomas winces. Gally’s family is great, but his mom is definitely where he got his Gally-ness from, if not his height. She’s petite and beautiful and quick to smile, but also somewhat ferocious.

Gally kicks out at the stool-leg that Chuck’s sitting on. “And what are we telling her?”

Chuck sighs heavily, tipping his head to the ceiling. “That I didn’t carry alcohol.”

“Specifically I said to tell her that you stayed at home,” Gally corrects. “And only to say you stayed in the car if she already knows you’re gone.”

“I wanted to see Thomas,” Chuck pouts. “Mom loves him, she wouldn’t mind that.”

Thomas rolls his tongue to try to disguise his smirk. Gally rolls his eyes. “Fine. Tell her I didn’t let you carry alcohol. And remember-”

“I know absolutely nothing about the moonshine, or Grandpa’s very illegal distillery.” Chuck is prompt with the answer in a way that Thomas knows comes from repetition.

“It’s not illegal,” Gally corrects quickly, finger in his face. “Come on, Kid, let’s go.”

Chuck hops cheerily off the stool and waves brightly as he heads to the door.

“Bye, Thomas! Happy Christmas!”

“You too, Chuck,” Thomas waves back at him. “Say hi to your mom for me.”

He throws a thumbs up and leaves, striding with purpose off down the hall like he’s been given a mission.

“See you tomorrow,” Gally says, more of a sigh as he shakes his head at his brother. “Tell Newt when he’s up that the receipts are in there so he can tally it up with the rest.”

“Sure,” Thomas says. They’ve been stockpiling receipts from all the food shopping so that they can split it all out after Christmas like usual. “Good luck.”

Gally scowls and follows after Chuck to the stairs without another word.

Thomas shuts and bolts the door, glances at the crates on the counter and decides they can wait. None particularly need refrigerating - not in the next couple of hours, anyway - so he slips back into the bedroom and crawls back under the blankets.

Newt hums, fingers reaching across the sheets for him. His voice comes out a little rough and thick with sleep, his accent a deep lilt. “The bloody hell was that?”

Thomas snorts quietly, drawing himself close. “Gally. And Chuck. Dropped off the drinks for tomorrow.”

“Good that,” Newt murmurs. His fingers brush across the centre of Thomas’ chest, orient themselves, and then press firmer into his solar plexus where bone gives way to muscle. Thomas instantly feels his breathing snag.

Newt moves across the mattress, kisses his forehead with a soft mouth. His fingers track lower, mapping between the scatter of hickeys. He reaches the elastic waistband of Thomas’ pajama pants and pauses.

“Off,” Newt says, more air than voice. He hooks his finger inside and lets the band snap to make a point. “Rules.”

Thomas rolls his eyes, huffing quietly in laughter as his blood runs thick. There’s a sort of lackadaisical awareness low at the base of his spine; something pleasant and drowsy and unrushed. Thomas kicks away the pajama pants and huddles back into Newt.

He’s used to waking up the little spoon, Newt still asleep at his back, but there’s something different about going back to bed after he’s gotten up. There were early morning classes for a while, but even if it’s just to make a cup of coffee, or answer the door, going back to find Newt still dream-drunk and sleep-pliant is something Thomas loves about being an early riser. He doesn’t fold himself back under Newt’s arm then, and he doesn’t now.

He lays facing him, curled to share the same pillow and brushes their noses together, just once. Newt’s smile melts into the pillow. His fingers shift to lace with Thomas’ and they both go back to sleep.

x

Christmas Eve has always been just theirs.

It was that way before they even got together. The first one after Thomas moved, he spent with Brenda and Jorge but then he’d met Newt the following Spring. By the time the next Christmas had rolled around, Jorge had moved to set up a homeless shelter and Brenda had flown out to spend it with him.

“You could come,” she’d said, throwing things into a suitcase in the middle of her dorm room, clothes everywhere like she’d set off a pipe bomb. It wasn’t the first time she’d offered. “You know you’re welcome, Thomas.”

“I can’t,” he’d said, smiling sadly, leaning on her door. “Newt’s family are all in England. Minho and Gally hired a fuck-buddies cabin because they’re absolutely not dating - not my words - so if I go…”

“Newt isn’t going home?”

“Costs too much for us lowly college sophomores. He’ll be on his own, so...I figured I’d stay.”

Brenda had smiled at him, something rich, blazing, entirely too knowing in her eyes. She’d nodded, said she understood, and promised to facetime him. She didn’t even tease him all the way to the airport; just hauled out her suitcase, kissed him on the cheek and hugged him goodbye.

She’d whispered “Good luck” and he’d never heard her so gentle.

He probably should have known then.

It hadn’t occurred to him, though.

He told his parents why he couldn’t go back, and they’d understood too, telling him he was a wonderful friend for not leaving someone alone for the holidays and that it gave them more space. He hadn’t quite been sure about going back anyway, and wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or not to have an excuse. He and Newt had found an airbnb because the campus was shutting down. It cost a decent chunk, but not nearly as much as a flight to England, and they’d spent an entirely platonic Christmas in a cottage a short road-trip away from campus.

Over time, their friendships had solidified, proved they weren’t transient like so many made in college years, and their childhood homes had started to seem further away. They’d made more plans together, left things behind in exchange for new ones that they were building on their own.

Even when they’d started to share Christmas, breaking so tentatively away from the families they were born or adopted into for the first time, Thomas and Newt had kept Christmas Eve.

The others don’t invade. There’s no knocks (usually), and no one expects them to answer their phones, either. They get up when they want, pick at food when they feel like it, and try to sabotage each other while they play on the temperamental Xbox.

Newt does call Alby before it gets too much later over there, but that doesn’t count. At least so far, it sounds like no one’s stabbed anyone else.

“Give it another ten hours,” Alby says through the phone. He looks merry enough on the facetime screen - though, that could be the bottle of cider he’s waving around.

He wishes them a good Christmas and hangs up to go let his sister in.

Thomas and Newt let the TV run through a heap of prime time Christmas movies, use the couch for a far better purpose than it’s intended one, and start piling gifts under the tree. Thomas texts Frypan to be sure they don’t have to do anything else in the kitchen and gets a reply telling him vehemently to leave it alone. Newt delivers Christmas cards to a couple of people in their building, and then they head outside into the snowy dark.

The rest of the cards are dropped into the mailbox on the corner and then they continue towards the park a few blocks up.

The park isn’t much, but in winter the neighborhoods deck it out. Strings of lights are draped around the trees, ornaments hanging from the bare branches and the thick drifts of snow are littered with confetti, little wooden reindeer and dozens of candy canes. The air smells of horse chestnut, peppermint and frost. People are milling around, all in their coats, boots and hats, sharing out thin column candles and helping each other light them. Children run around the trees, collecting up the confetti and making snowballs.

Between two wooden benches, the local choir has assembled themselves into two neat rows. They’re wearing red velvet cloaks trimmed with fur over their parkas and jackets, faces pink, eyes bright and starry. They all wear santa hats with silver bells chiming away on the ends, and hold little paper carol books in their matching gloves.

Thomas remembers growing up listening to carollers - ones who’d sing in the mall, ones on the TV singing at Midnight Mass and very occasionally, ones who’d go door to door in the area with their lanterns. Newt hadn’t had that as much and it wasn’t something he’d had an attachment to, so when Thomas wanted to check out the Park Party the first year they moved in, Newt came for him.

He’d liked it, though. The neighbors all mostly left each other alone so the two of them stood between the trees that night, talking and swaying quietly, hands in each other’s pockets, still learning how to be with each other in so many new ways. Then they came back the year after.

With each passing year, they’re carving out their own traditions, making enough that one day, they might fill a lifetime.

Tonight is little different.

Thomas squeezes Newt’s hands, folded between his own and Newt huddles firmer against his back, forehead pressing into the folds of Thomas’ scarf. It’s dark, almost bitterly cold, and they haven’t picked up a candle. Thomas doesn’t want to let go long enough to bother with one. The snow is still coming down and the lights blink and flutter in a way they don’t at home, so they never stay too long. They stay enough to breathe it in and listen to the music, feel the world pause, and then they go.

It always reminds Thomas just a little of his childhood, but usually it’s a fleeting thing. The new memories are stronger, the only tie left is the sound of the choir singing. This time, though, it stays long enough to become a thought.

“What is it?” Newt asks into his scarf, and Thomas doesn’t ask how he knew.

“Just...thinking,” he says. He exhales, the air in his lungs born into a cloud that the cold steals away. “I haven’t been back in a long time. I just...left, you know. I needed to, to breathe. Teresa did, even if I didn’t get it at the time. I just...I’m thinking maybe I didn’t have to make it like a clean break, you know?”

“You didn’t,” Newt says, soft and certain. He lifts his head. “But you did what was right for you, and that’s okay, Thomas.”

Thomas nods. “I know, but…what would you think? If maybe next year I wanted to see them all? It’s not just mom and dad; there’s a couple of the young ones who wouldn’t even recognise me.”

Newt’s heartbeat soaks in through Thomas’ back, a steady, constant beat that doesn’t flicker or fall when he asks.

“Then we can go,” Newt replies. “But don’t do it because you think you should, or because of your sister. Do it because it’s what you want.”

“And you’d come with me?” Thomas asks, twisting himself between Newt’s arms so he can see his face properly. “Even if we only went down for a day?”

“We drove two hours to visit my Gran for half that time,” Newt laughs. His face sobers, though, and he unlaces one of their hands to curl his fingers at the back of Thomas’ head, delving under the edge of the beanie he’s wearing. Newt kisses him once, and says, “I love you. I’ll go for you, not for them.”

“I’ll tell them you said that,” Thomas mutters, but he knows he’s smiling, the promise burning bright in his bloodstream.

Newt rubs his thumb at the nape of Thomas’ neck and then lets him go. “Come on. We can open the Eggnog before the others get here tomorrow.”

They start a snowball fight on the way back to the apartment and tumble inside soaking wet and freezing cold, laughing and kissing fiercely.

Thomas piles blankets into the living room, Newt makes hot chocolate and they turn on the gas fire. It’s not quite the same sense of character as the open log hearth in the cottage from years ago, but at least it’s real flames and far less likely to burn the building down.

When it’s gone midnight and officially Christmas Day, Thomas sits up.

The lights are out, so the only source comes from the warm orange glow of the fire licking it’s way up the ceramic logs. It doesn’t cast a lot of light; shadows thick and black just out of it’s reach, swallowing the edges of the room and reducing the world to a pool in the middle of the rug. The heat is dense, though, like a weighted blanket.

The bedroom feels remote and cold, the sun-glazed morning when Thomas had traced his thumb across Newt’s head is so sharp in his mind but feels like it happened in another place.

“We should go to bed,” Thomas says reluctantly, “and turn this off before we run out.”

Newt tugs him back down, folding around him right in the path of heat from the fireplace. “Happy Christmas,” he says, words the shape of a kiss pressed hot just under Thomas’ ear. “I paid for twice the amount of gas for this month. Leave it on.”


	4. Chapter 4

“No, we haven’t started cooking anything, Nana.”

Nana looks horrified on the screen of Newt’s phone, holding hers out at arm’s length in the facetime feed. “Haven’t start- You’ll never have it all done in time if you don’t get a move on, my love. It takes-”

“Mum,” Newt’s father interrupts. “He’s got it sorted. He’s not new to it. They have that friend of theirs - the one who sent you the recipe for November Cakes - he does the cooking.”

Nana waves him away somewhere off screen and Newt hears his mother laughing.

“Such a lovely boy,” Nana says. “You promise you’ve got it all in hand?”

Newt realises he’s smiling. “It’s all fine, Nana. And it’s still early here - you’re hours ahead.”

“I know all about time zones, don’t you lecture me,” she says, bright and joyous. “And what about Thomas? Is that young man of yours making himself useful?”

Newt tries to control his expression. Thomas currently is being about as useful as a chocolate teapot; Newt can hear him just outside the front door, laughing with Sonya and Harriet. The lack of bang and clatter implies they’ve stopped for another rest break. Still, he was definitely very useful earlier, before their second wave of alarms went off when there were rather less clothes involved.

“Of course,” is what he tells Nana.

She scoffs at him. “I know that look. It’s far too much for these old eyes.”

Newt’s father leans into the shot, head over his mother’s shoulder. “Her eyes are never getting old,” he says in a stage whisper. “She can see like a hawk even now.”

“I can see you aren’t mixing up that stuffing like I told you,” Nana says pointedly. “Go on, off with you. You gave me the phone, this is my grandson time. Go earn your keep.”

“It’s my house!”

“And I’m cooking.”

Newt laughs. It’s the same laugh as his dad’s as he flicks the jingling bell on Nana’s santa hat and hustles away to do as he’s told with a quick, “Yes, ma’am.”

There’s another bash just outside the door and Newt looks up, away from the phone right as Thomas almost falls through it.

“Blo-- Tommy, what-”

Thomas catches himself, shakes his head and then pulls all his weight backwards to haul a huge dining table through the gap.

“Good grief, what on earth is happening over there?” Nana asks. Her video feed tilts to the left, like she thinks she can see around their apartment if she moves her end. Newt doesn’t bother to correct her. He turns the phone, propping it up on the centre counter with the tire iron they usually use for the cutlery drawer.

“Hold on, Nana,” he tells her, and leaves to go help.

The table is on its side - the only way it was ever going to fit through the door - but it’s still the same hard ask every year. The stairwell is wider, so in a twist of irony, getting it down three flights is actually the easier part because the hall is both narrow and crooked with uneven floorboards like landmines. By the time it reaches them, they always seem to get it wedged halfway through the door and forget how they maneuvered it last year.

Which is where it is now; stuck. Newt leans around one of the legs jutting into the air and peers into the corridor.

Harriet has her phone out. Newt watches her cheerfully snap a photo of Sonya throwing two peace signs from behind the table, and then start instagramming it.

“Going well then?” he asks dryly.

“As always,” Sonya beams. “Merry Christmas. We have two chairs ready to go. We can scrounge up the desk chair too, if you need it, but the gas lift is broken so it’ll sink before we carve the turkey.”

“We’ll stick Gally in it,” Thomas says.

Sonya presses a smile between her lips and then apparently gives up on trying to suppress it. “I texted Brenda and she says she can fit one in her car.”

“So long as it isn’t the rocking chair,” Harriet mutters. “Not after last time.”

Thomas shakes his head. “She snapchatted it already. It’s Jorge’s old barstool.”

“Dibsed,” Sonya says.

“I’ll call Minho in a bit,” Newt offers. “See how many they’ve managed to get attached to the roof of the car this time. I’d rather we didn’t have to borrow Winston’s regency era bergère armchair but…”

“Doesn’t that have a bloodstain on it?” Sonya asks.

Thomas shrugs. “He swears it’s cranberry sauce.”

Harriet shakes her head, still busy applying filters on her phone. “I’m so glad I’m off duty whenever I’m in this building.”

Sonya giggles and blows her a kiss, before turning back to the table. “Okay, come on.”

Newt shifts out of the way. He has acute experience with how much damage this table can do when it goes from solidly wedged to just the right angle and almost flings itself through the gap. It’s really remarkable there aren’t more scars on the walls and floor.

He heads back to the counter, hopping back onto the stool and turning his phone from the commotion in the doorway.

Nana is humming along to Frosty the Snowman, just the top of her santa hat visible and the camera mostly looking up at the ceiling light.

“Nana?”

She stops humming with a little ‘oh!’ and snatches the phone up again.

“Alright there, love?”

Newt isn’t sure he’d define it as alright, but he nods.

“I thought I saw Thomas,” she says. “And that girl - the one from upstairs?”

“Yeah, they’re just bringing in the table.”

Nana rolls her eyes. “Honestly, Dear, you really should just get your own.”

Newt shakes his head, smiling, and hears the shriek of wood behind him that says they’ve managed to pry it into the apartment. A quick glance back tells him no one died. “Not enough space,” he says.

“I know what IKEA is,” Nana replies, and she jabs a wooden spoon at the phone screen. “You can get collapsible ones these days.”

Newt doesn’t tell her that if they were going to get a table, it wouldn’t be for the primary purpose of eating on - at least… - and that a collapsible one wouldn’t hack it.

“Hi, Elaine,” Thomas says over Newt’s shoulder.

Nana is instantly distracted and Newt sighs, slouching back to rest his head in the crook of Thomas’ neck. It’s a quiet thank you that he daren’t say aloud while Nana can see him.

“Thomas, what have I told you my name is?” Nana scolds him. She’s beating furiously at a bowl of whip cream with her spoon, pink in the cheeks from the effort and her hat jingling away.

Thomas pulls a bashful smile. “Sorry, Nana. Merry Christmas.”

“That's better,” she rolls her eyes fondly. “Merry Christmas, love. Newt tells me you haven’t started the cooking yet.”

Newt groans and Thomas muffles a laugh against his shoulder. “No,” Thomas agrees. “Our friend will be over soon to start it. I’ve been told not to touch anything until he’s here, and you have to respect a guy’s kitchen.”

It’s fascinating, really; watching Nana fold like a house of cards.

“You’re such a good lad,” she tells him. “Alright, go on - you’ve placated your old Nan enough. Have a wonderful day, my loves.”

“Don’t hang up!” Newt’s mum shouts, and the phone whirls for a moment - flashes of Newt’s old home back in England. There’s a glimpse of the ceiling, the carpet, the crazy flagstone of the kitchen floor and the edge of a table runner. Then his mum appears.

She’s beautiful, as always - little santas swinging from her pierced ears, her smile the same shape as Newt’s own and a pair of felt antlers over her curled honey-gold hair.

“How’s mom?” she asks, and her accent gives her away. It’s a subtle lilt, a blended mesh now, but no matter how long she’s lived in England, little bits of Virginia still show through. “Think she’ll come out and visit any time soon?”

“We saw her; she’s great. Not likely, though,” Newt says. “Leave her paintball team? And you know what she always says - it’s rainy and gray and if she wanted to see a castle she’d Google it.”

Newt’s mum rolls her eyes. “You can’t hear the British accent on Google.”

“Oi!” Newt’s dad shouts. “You only married me for my accent?”

“You married me for mine!”

Thomas tucks his head even lower, shaking with suppressed laughter and he says in an undertone, “She has a point.”

Newt elbows him, but he’s smiling anyway.

“Alright, you should go,” his mum says, turning back to the phone screen. “I’m glad you saw her and I’m happy I got to see you both. Have a lovely day, boys.”

They say their goodbyes, and Newt hangs up, dropping his phone on the counter and turning around on the stool until he can rest his forehead on Thomas’ instead.

“That was so cute I might be sick,” Harriet says.

Newt sits up. She and Sonya are stood beside the enormous table which takes up all the floorspace between the kitchen counter and the bedroom door. They still have to get it into the middle of the living room without taking out the tree. Harriet is beaming at them over the top of her phone and Newt makes a mental note to check her instagram later and screenshot the photo.

“Thanks,” he says dryly. “Let’s get this into place before we wake any more of the neighbors.”

x

Not long after Harriet and Sonya leave, Thomas’ phone goes off.

He fishes it out of his back pocket, thumbs the screen and then blinks in shuttered surprise.

“Thomas?” Newt asks. Something faint pulls in his heart like someone tugging on a loose thread until it starts to unravel.

“It’s mom,” Thomas says blankly, his eyes scanning as he reads the text. “They know Teresa’s here - said she called the other day to update them. She asked if we can Skype for a bit.”

“Do you want to?” Newt checks. He turns away from the early makings of a mug of tea, bracing his arms against the kitchen counter where he can look at Thomas properly.

He’s still kind of rumpled and wired at once from the logistical nightmare of moving the table. There’s a red mark on his arm and under the cut of his jaw, both of which will be gone inside of an hour (Newt knows what it takes to leave a bruise on him). He’s holding the phone like it’s something both precious and dangerous, tapping a reply and chewing on his lip. He sends the text and looks up, already moving.

“Yeah,” he says, kind of airless. “I’m gonna get the laptop.”

Newt points a finger up towards the ceiling in offering. “I can head up and help bring the chairs down early.”

Thomas scoffs from the living room. He’s unhooking the laptop from the TV and calls over his shoulder, “No way - you’re going to be here when I tell them you said they’re not worthy enough to visit.”

“That’s not what I said,” Newt corrects, amused. The blankness on Thomas’ face when he’d first looked at his phone has gone, and the responding pang of tightness in Newt’s chest has eased along with it. It’s left him room to find it funny, and wonder if Thomas will ever let it go.

Thomas throws him a smirk and sets the computer down on the table. He sits on the arm of the couch in front of the screen and powers it up while Newt finishes making the tea, the overworked whir of the fan kicking off a droll soundtrack to the morning. They really should get that fixed. They’ve asked too much of it this week, clearly.

Thomas is just logging into Skype when Newt crosses to him, setting one of the mugs down a safe distance from the wheezing laptop.

“You haven’t spoken to them yet, then?” Newt asks, inhaling the steam off his own cup.

“No,” Thomas winces. “I’ve texted, and said hi to the younger ones in the family chat but...I wasn’t sure if Teresa had told them she was here yet. I didn’t want to say too much if she hadn’t.”

Newt reaches to ruffle his hair and then kisses the top of his head. “You’re a good brother.”

“I’m still telling them what you said.”

x

The knock at the door barely pauses the manic energy in the apartment.

Newt shifts carefully around Harriet, Zart and Jeff - all laying the table - and then ducks under Frypan as he strides through the archway with a steaming hot crockpot full of brussel sprouts. Winston is sharpening a vicious looking knife that Newt knows he and Thomas don’t own, but at least he’s stood far out of the way, right in the corner of the kitchen. Sonya is tipping a veritable mountain of colorful vegetables into a huge bowl and Brenda has her head pressed into the hanging jackets, phone to her ear.

Newt pulls back the bolt in the middle of another knock.

“Daphne alert,” Minho says. He leaps through the doorway the instant Newt opens it, propelling a ladder chair ahead of him strapped to a hand truck. “On the stairs. She’s started on the sherry already.”

Newt slams the door shut.

Minho shrugs out of his parka and then almost throws it right over Brenda’s head as he aims it at the wall hooks. He seems to spot her at the last minute.

“Brenda?”

She pulls her head out of Frypan’s duffel coat and waves. “Yeah. Hi.”

Newt takes Minho’s jacket off him and hands it to her. She hangs it up and buries herself back into her cave.

“Jorge,” Newt explains, prodding Minho inside. “She couldn’t get through this morning.”

“Move!” Frypan barks.

Minho backtracks fast - years of practice - and he drags the hand truck with him, wheels squeaking on the floorboards. Newt stumbles back with both of them, clearing a path of sorts for Frypan to sweep through with a bucket of potatoes.

“Where’s Thomas?” Minho asks.

Newt points to the back corner of the living room. “Teresa brought her friend with her. Aris? He’s not really a people person but he seems okay talking to Thomas.”

“Oh yeah?” Minho says, both amused and probing. He leans out, neck craned to look over to the corner. “He moving in on your boy?”

Newt snorts. “He can try. Where’d you leave Gally?”

Minho turns to Newt very seriously. “Where’d you think? The second floor. I saw the Scooby Doo lady coming and legged it. Each man for themselves.”

Newt bites on his tongue so he won’t laugh and shoves Minho towards the archway. “Go sort out the chairs. Brenda brought hers up, Sonya and Harriet brought theirs down. All of our stools are by the window. If we don’t have enough we have to ask Winston.”

Minho winces. “I’ll sit on Brenda’s rocking chair before I sit on anything he brings over here.”

x

An argument breaks out over the parsnips. Zart sits on all four beanbags stacked one on top of the other. Brenda whines only once about the lack of good music on vinyl and Aris even joins at the far end of the table, letting Sonya ply him with servings. Newt twists his ankle around Thomas’ between their chair legs and Gally swaps out his fork with Jeff’s after it touches a runaway sprout.

Winston starts carving up the turkey with entirely too much gleeful efficiency.

Teresa leans over to Thomas on Newt’s other side, and he hears the wary whisper of, “He’s...really good with knives.” that sounds like a question.

Thomas shrugs. “Mafia.”

There’s not much more they can offer her at this point. 

“At least it was already dead,” Zart says. He offers this like it’s even in the realm of reassuring, and appears immune to half the table suddenly shooting him ‘stop. Right now’ looks.

Teresa drops her fork. “What?”

Thomas sighs.

“Two years ago we forgot to buy a turkey?” Harriet winces. She’s all too aware of just how ridiculous it is to forget the main part of Christmas dinner. She gestures vaguely as she passes the vegetables to Thomas. “When Winston said he could sort it out...well-”

“We were expecting it to be dead, at least,” Zart says. “Not…”

Brenda lifts her eyebrows. “Running around the fourth floor shedding feathers?”

She takes the bowl of sage and onion stuffing off of Gally before it can reach Jeff, not that he's paying attention.

“Should have been more specific,” Winston shrugs and Jeff's too busy watching him with placid happiness. He sets down the knives. “Done. Pass up your plates.”

Teresa swallows and sits back. Newt can only hope they haven’t scarred her for life.

The bird this year was huge to start with - big enough to feed all thirteen of them - but by the time everyone has a serving on their plate, Winston has picked it’s bones clean.

“Alright,” Frypan says, appearing at the head of the table with two huge gravy jugs. He holds them up one after the other. “This one is tar, this one will run faster than Thomas evading campus police that one time. Pick your poison. And don’t worry - no rocking chair this year.”

“What’s the story with the rocking chair?” Teresa asks as they start passing the gravy down the table.

Evidently she’s not too upset by the turkey revelation if she’s still happy asking questions.

“Brenda’s,” Gally says. He’s already sinking for the second time; the broken gas lift making a pathetic whistling sound of dead air. He’s doing a great job of ignoring it; sitting tall with all the grace of a captain on a sinking ship. “One year we were short so she brought the rocker. Frypan was sitting in it pouring gravy when Zart stood on the bit that sticks out at the back.”

There’s a sudden pressure at the table as everyone sits tight on the urge to laugh while Teresa’s eyes go wide.

Sonya says, “He shot backwards and threw the gravy at the ceiling.”

“It was an accident,” Zart says plaintively, but he’s smiling into his spoonful of runner beans.

“No more of those,” Frypan says, taking his seat finally now it seems like everything is ready. “This year we’re gonna be accident free.”

Newt raises an eyebrow at him and then glances down the table.

Aris is pulling a cracker with Sonya like he doesn’t even know what it does. Harriet has a paper crown on her head, perched between her braids. Minho is taking Gally’s enforced serving of sprouts off of him and giving up his cauliflower in return. Brenda and Thomas have already pulled their crackers and are reading out terrible jokes as they flick tiny plastic frogs at each other.

“I really think you’re asking for a lot there,” Newt says.

Frypan cracks open a bottle of wine. "Merry fucking Christmas."

x

They laze around after dinner.

Frypan puts away all the leftovers, even though he’ll just take them out again in six more hours for them to pick at until midnight. Newt’s phone continues to pulse out Christmas music on the dock as they all gather around the table again to play Cards Against Humanity. When Sonya and Gally win too many times at that, they move on to poker and use table confetti to bet with.

Winston is so sure of his hand in the fourth round that he bets an entire motorcycle, and because none of them can be sure he got it legally (or worse), they all fold and decide Charades is safer.

It’s slowly dripping into the evening when Newt drops into the cool, shadowy kitchen for a bottle of water and realizes Teresa followed him.

“You okay?” he asks her. “Drink?”

She shakes her head, smiling. “No, thank you. I just...wanted to say thank you, actually.”

Newt raises his eyebrows. “I’m not sure what for, but I’m pretty sure I don’t need you to.”

She bites at her lip, glancing back into the riot of blended laughter and melted color that fills the living room. Then she sinks against the counter so she can rest her elbows on it. All their stools are still scattered around the abandoned table.

“For letting me in,” she says. “Especially this time of year. I know it was out of nowhere, and that you have this life, with Thomas, and everyone and...I didn’t mean to intrude on it but I’m just really glad you let me be a small part of it.”

Newt swallows a long mouthful of water, feeling it flush through his system, sharply cool in a way that brings the world into focus. He sets it down. “I was right,” he shrugs. “I didn’t need you to thank me.”

He tips his head towards the living room, knows that Teresa will get he means Thomas, and says plainly, “We have a life, yeah, but you were a big part of his. Why you fell out of it - that’s yours to deal with, you don’t owe that to me. You owe it to him, and one day he’ll ask. But you grew up together. Whatever interfered with that, he wanted you here this week. We both did.”

“You did?” Teresa asks, eyes flitting up quickly, like she might be trying to catch him in a lie. “You’re just such a big part of his life now and I wasn’t here for any of it - I know that’s my fault. I know. But you haven’t really...I don’t know...pushed?”

Newt thinks he gets it. In this, she’s a little like Thomas. He’s spoken to her, included her, stopped Minho winding her up - but he hasn’t sought her out exactly. He’s never asked the kind of questions that open wounds or press on bruises. It seems like maybe she was expecting him to.

“You fell out of his life, not mine,” Newt tells her. “I’m not the person who has a right to hate you, or the ability to forgive you. Thomas can take care of himself; he knows what it meant when he let you stay. He wanted you here, but he’s not the same person you left behind when you moved out. I’m sure you’re not the same either. You both need to learn who you are now - not just this week but after it - if you’re going to hold onto each other.

“Me getting in the way of that won’t help either of you.”

Teresa’s eyes are glassy, and she looks slightly close to tears, even though Newt gets the impression she’s not the kind of person who’d let them fall easy.

“I just want him happy,” Newt says. “That’s all.”

She proves him right when she sniffs and then straightens, her head tipping back just a bit as she smiles. Her whole face softens when she does, and Newt wonders if she thinks she has to live with walls up all the time. Maybe that’s something she can unlearn. Maybe it’s something she’ll want to, some day.

Thomas rounds the wall in the same instant, and Newt idly wonders if he might have heard any of the conversation, not that it bothers him either way. “Gally and Harriet are tipping the table against the wall to clear room for presents,” he tells them. “Fry is determined to get something worthy of going viral on camera so I left. You okay?”

“I won’t be if he’s still filming when they knock a hole in the wall,” Newt says.

“We’re good,” Teresa snorts.

A week ago she might have asked if that was likely. Now she just takes it in stride. Newt thinks there’s hope for whatever relationship she and Thomas want to rebuild.

Thomas steals Newt’s water bottle, and Newt lets him. He wonders whether Frypan would notice if he snuck one of the leftover stuffing balls - probably - and whether the risk is worth it. He’s just about to open the fridge, risk be damned, when Thomas says to him without looking around, “Not worth it.”

Newt smirks. Thomas shakes his head and tips back a mouthful of water, the moles scattered on his throat shifting with the swallow. Fondness burns through Newt's blood, soaks into his bones and saturates the air in his lungs. 

Teresa sniggers and says, “Mom and Dad would be so happy for you two.”

Newt looks up at that, half an eye warily on the arch to the living room before he throws Teresa a small smile.

“They are,” Thomas says. “Mom said she’d buy us lunch if we dropped by to visit and Dad still thinks Newt’s out of my league. He’s not wrong.”

“Shut up,” Newt mutters, abandoning the fridge-theft to kiss the side of Thomas’ head. He steals back his water bottle instead.

Teresa, though, has gone utterly still the other side of the counter. “You’ve spoken to them?”

Thomas frowns at her. “Yeah. Actually, we Skyped this morning. Usually it’s just calls here and there but they said you’d told them you were here. Mom asked.”

“Wait, so-...” she pauses and blinks at the countertop like the image of the world she has imprinted behind her eyes is wrong. “They know now?”

Thomas is still frowning, though he half laughs when he says, “‘Resa they’ve known for years.”

Newt still remembers that first Christmas they’d spent together, trying to get a stable Wi-Fi connection long enough to Skype Thomas’ parents then. It had been a pixelated, jumpy feed, but Thomas had introduced them, apologizing for not being in touch more. They’d waved him off with unwavering understanding and then asked Newt about his life.

The next year Thomas had called them while he and Newt were still lying in bed - back before the no clothes under the covers rule.

“Have you met anyone yet?” his dad had asked. “Girl, guy, maybe you just bought a puppy?”

Thomas had snorted in laughter and said, “Not the puppy, but yeah. And actually, you’ve met him too.”

Thomas was still figuring out who he was, learning that distance didn’t necessarily mean a clean break. The frequency of the calls hadn’t picked up and Thomas didn’t talk about them any more often, but ever since, they’d asked about Newt. At first it was casual, but Thomas had said he could feel the shift, some uniquely parent emotion, when they’d realized Newt wasn’t going anywhere.

Here, in the middle of the dark kitchen, listening to the others try to move the table like they’re auditioning for an episode of Chucklevision, Teresa stares at them, somewhere between stunned and despairing.

“But- they never told me. I thought-”

Thomas leans across to squeeze her hand. “That I was hiding it from them?” he guesses. “No. I just...felt guilty, I guess. I didn’t have a working number for you, and we’d fallen out of touch. I didn’t even know you still spoke to them. It sucked that they’d known all this time and I couldn’t even get you on the phone to tell you. They said they wouldn’t say anything so that it could still come from me eventually, and then I just didn’t think about it again.”

Teresa’s eyes have gone wide, and she goes still with the kind of shock that looks like someone’s punched her, or pulled the ground away and left her in freefall. “Wait- so- you know-know?”

She blinks at Newt.

This is a different question, saturated with a whole lot more gravity, and it only became relevant for Teresa after learning Newt actually knows their parents.

“That you and Thomas aren’t actually blood related?” Newt guesses. The way she sucks in a breath, he figures that is what she meant. “Yeah, I’ve known that for almost four years.”

“You never brought it up...” Teresa’s air seems to run out halfway through and she tails off, eyes over-bright and glassy.

“Because it doesn’t matter,” Newt replies, darting a glance to Thomas, but Thomas already knows this. “Family isn’t just what you’re born with, and sometimes that’s not family at all. You’re still his sister.”

Teresa swallows, glancing Thomas’ way herself now. He watches the both of them passively from over by the sink and just lifts his eyebrows at her in a way that comes across like ‘your move’.

She goes with, “You know the rest, I’m guessing, then?”

Newt nods, figures that won’t be enough, and follows with, “I know Thomas was around five when your parents fostered him. He was the fourth foster kid they’d ever had but the first two were older, so it was just the two of you for a while. They adopted you both, and most of your younger siblings too. By the time you left Thomas was one of seven and the youngest was not quite two.”

He stops, in case that’s too much for her to deal with, but Teresa laughs a little instead. She looks newly weightless like she isn’t carrying something heavy between her shoulder blades any more.

“There were always more,” she says, fond and bright. “It felt kind of overcrowded by the time I applied to college. They wanted to help so many of the kids in the system - it never mattered to them how old they were, or why they were there. ‘Even if we’re just a stop on the way for them, it’s just one more family they get ‘til they find the right one’, that’s what they used to tell us all when someone new arrived.”

“They were good at it,” Thomas says softly, and it feels more like he’s reminiscing than telling Newt.

Newt knows his parents were good at it. He doesn’t call them by their given names, and even though he left when he turned eighteen, intending to break it off, he still stayed in touch. He’s been conflicted about going back, because as far as the law is concerned, they did their job. Thomas reached adulthood and left. His parents got one more space to take in someone that needs them, and yet years later, Thomas still holds onto them in small ways.

Newt’s worked with enough kids that fell through the cracks, shuffled through home after home, and he knows a good one when he sees it.

“The best,” Teresa agrees. “They never gave us a reason to think we had to go. Do you think we just couldn’t accept it? Like it was too much of a good thing?”

Thomas sighs and says carefully, “If that’s why you left then I get it. I knew they cared, though.

“I was too young when I went to them to have the memories you did. I just realised when I graduated that I’d done so many of the things I was meant to, that they’d wanted for me, and that me staying meant they couldn’t save another kid. Someone else deserved that chance, and I deserved to find out who I was without them.”

Teresa smiles again. Maybe those might come easier now that they’ve started to clear some things up. “You’re someone good, Thomas,” she says.

“Well,” Thomas shrugs. “We let Minho loose to hand out gifts, live down the hall from someone who possibly keeps blood money under his kitchen sink and we bought a four foot singing Santa from Target just because we felt like it. Maybe hold off on that judgement.”

x

The gift sharing was always going to end in mayhem, Newt isn’t sure he expected much else.

Zart gets a four foot cactus and Minho wastes no time making the singing Santa serenade it. The pile of shredded paper in the middle of the room grows as everything from a mop bucket to gourmet meal coupons are unearthed. Sonya has even pulled together a few bucks from everyone to get Aris something. He clutches the gift in his corner, smiling as brightly as he has all day and looking less likely to bolt by the minute.

Newt is folded around Thomas and they’re both idly messing up a game of cat’s cradle as they try to knot each other’s fingers when it happens.

Minho stole the armchair off of Teresa and Gally is curled up on the floor in front of it, half buried in torn up paper. He throws some of it off, reaches into a pocket and then tosses something up at Minho.

It’s a tiny velvet box and Minho catches it out of the air before it can crack him between the eyes.

“Wanna marry me?” Gally shrugs.

Thomas makes a tiny sound at the back of his throat like air let out of a tire and Newt feels like he’s swallowed a rubber ball that starts leaping around in his stomach. Everyone’s gone still, but none of them stiller than Minho.

He blinks, gaping, eyes fixed on the box.

Gally waits. The rest of them have no idea what to do, so they wait as well. Then Minho pockets the box without opening it and lifts his gaze to Gally.

“You _Asshole_!”

He says it with intense feeling and then shoves Gally face forwards into the paper, soundly ignoring the way Gally’s smiling like this is everything he wanted out of a proposal. Minho stands up and strides away.

“Uh-” Frypan says, something like horror settling into deep grooves on his face. Brenda looks about four seconds away from nervous laughter and Jeff has a hand stuffed in his mouth. It’s hard to tell if he’s laughing or crying.

Minho doesn’t leave, though. He crosses to the tree, sticking his hand between the branches and rummaging. Two ornaments fall off, and a piece of tinsel comes loose but no one really cares. He spins back to the room, his arm launching in an arc like he’s pitching a baseball and a different tiny box pelts directly for Gally’s head out of his fist.

Gally catches it, spitting out paper, and turns it over before his jaw drops and his head snaps up.

Frypan’s hands clap over his mouth. Winston makes a yelp he’ll never admit to later and Harriet’s hand flashes out to squeeze Sonya’s. Newt blinks, his brain full of white noise. He can feel the heat of the gas fire at his back, the crinkle and crush of paper around his legs, and the weight of Thomas against his chest, his skipping heart soaking through their sweaters. It all feels slightly detached, though; only the knotted cat’s cradle tethering him to the apartment.

“You guys did plan this, right?” Thomas asks, weakly. “Like to...try to be the first one?”

“No. No no. _I_ planned it!” Minho is still wound tight and spitting fire, his hair on end. He points an accusing finger at Gally. “He didn’t plan shit. You fuckhead - how could you ask first?”

Gally, entirely too distracted and also mollified by the glint of the platinum band in the box, shrugs. “You took too long? How was I supposed to know you had a ring, too?”

“You’re unbelievable,” Minho says. “Now what? Someone Google how you deal with two proposals. Which one do we use?”

“Not that I’m an expert,” Sonya pipes up, “but did either of you actually propose? Because-”

“I said ‘Marry me’,” Gally offers.

Minho scoffs loudly.

“Isn’t it meant to be a question?” Winston asks.

“There was an implied question mark,” Gally retorts. “I didn’t even get a question.”

Minho throws up his hands. “Marry me, you impatient Dickhead.”

Gally smiles, softer than he usually looks capable of and he looks inordinately pleased considering. “Yeah.”

A small awed smile spills onto Minho’s face in return, and he flushes, his shoulders sinking as all the manic energy evaporates off the top of his head. He stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Guess I accept yours too, then,” he says. He seems to be aiming for off-hand, but his voice cracks a little, tainted rich with how happy he is.

“It’d make being married easier,” Frypan agrees.

Minho kicks some paper at him, then pulls the first box out of his pocket. His fingers are reverent and soft as he thumbs over the lid.

“We’re going for a walk,” Gally says abruptly.

Minho’s already moving around the back of the couch. “Yeah we could use more logs.”

“It’s a gas fire,” Thomas points out, but it goes ignored.

“Don’t have sex in the hall,” Newt calls after them as they both dash for the door. “Congrats.”

“Are we going to have to celebrate this every year too, now?” Harriet asks, groaning. “That’s a lot of effort.”

Thomas snorts. “No. Minho would never share an anniversary for anything. They’ll get re-engaged after New Year, just wait.”

x

Winston and Jeff leave first.

“No rest for us,” Jeff says, clapping Thomas on the shoulder. “I’m on call for Boxing day. Thanks, guys.”

“I can have this, right?”

Newt looks around and spots Winston holding the turkey carcass up. “Um-”

Winston gives him a flat look. “It’s for the cats.”

“Leave the wishbone for Brenda,” Thomas tells him. Brenda and Jorge always split a wishbone and that hasn’t changed even if they’re states apart these days. “Otherwise it’s all yours.”

“It’s already in the fridge,” Winston says, and drops the foil-wrapped turkey into his bag.

After them is Zart.

“If I head back now I’ll be in time for board games before my sister goes to bed,” he says, and then calls out his goodbyes, stumbling off to the stairs with his over-sized cactus.

Minho and Gally return from their walk looking entirely too red, ruffled and fucked out.

Thomas sends them both off home again, pushing a cotton sack full of their gifts into Gally’s hands.

“Go, we don’t need this shit here,” he says, and Newt laughs from the doorway.

“You bought us this shit,” Minho points out.

“I meant the two of you looking one insult away from blowing each other,” Thomas corrects. “Now fuck off.” Minho goes pink in the cheeks even though his eyebrows leap and his expression is smug. Thomas hugs him around the shoulders and his voice drops. “Congrats, guys.”

Minho squeezes him back, and then the two of them head off. 

Frypan and Brenda leave an hour later, after they’ve helped clear up the kitchen and put most of the debris into the trash.

Brenda stops to give Teresa a hug while Frypan is telling Thomas what not to touch in the refrigerator until tomorrow. Teresa wasn’t expecting it, and her face almost crumples as Brenda holds her tight, muttering soft enough to her that Newt can’t hear. He can see Brenda’s mouth moving, though, and the way Teresa presses her lips together, nodding into Brenda’s shoulder. They part and Teresa gives her a hopeful, grateful smile.

“You did good,” Brenda tells Newt when she reaches him, punching the side of her fist into his arm with no force.

Newt tilts his head back towards Teresa. “So did you. You just did a lot for them, you know that?”

“You have no idea what I said to her,” Brenda says like she’s trying to defend an image of herself as a hard-ass. (Too late, all things considered).

Newt shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. You love Thomas, and you know he loves her. And you know she’s okay, too. You wouldn’t have said anything to get in the way if they’re trying to learn to be family again.”

Brenda rolls her eyes and mutters, “Shut up.” Newt smirks. She punches him again, just a little more force this time, but then she shrugs too. “She’s alright, yeah. The things we’ll do for that boy, huh?”

Newt bites into his own smile, glancing back into the kitchen as Frypan shoves a cupboard closed in Thomas’ face. Thomas covers his face to try to hide a laugh.

“Pretty much anything,” Newt agrees, even though it didn’t need an answer.

Brenda hugs him then, warm and heart-felt even if she doesn’t linger too long. She turns from it to holler across at Frypan. “You ready? I’m leaving now if you want a lift.”

Frypan carries out a stack of dishes all covered in yet more foil, his backpack stuffed full of his gifts. Brenda hooks her bag of presents over the back of Jorge’s barstool and then hefts that over her shoulder. She looks a bit like a new-age Dick Whittington with a bindle stick as she strides off with the bag swaying in her wake.

“We’ll pick up the table tomorrow,” Sonya says when she and Harriet pack up to leave as well.

“Don’t have sex on it,” Harriet warns them sharply.

Thomas raises an eyebrow. “You do.”

“It’s our table.”

Thomas shakes his head, laughing, and Harriet shoves his shoulder before hugging him and then herding Sonya out. Newt shuts the door behind them, sagging against it.

“Think Nana would buy us a collapsible table from IKEA?” he asks.

Thomas snorts dryly. “Only if you didn’t tell her why you wanted it.”

Aris says a quiet thank you and leaves with very little fanfare to wait in the stairwell.

Newt contents himself with a little more tidying, so the living room is at least not a deathtrap when they wake up in the morning. There’s still chairs all over that their friends need to claim, and the table seems somewhat precarious, tipped on two legs and leant against the wall, but there’s not much else to be done with it. It belonged to Harriet’s great grandparents and the thing is solid wood; Newt can’t move it on his own.

Thomas and Teresa talk quietly in the kitchen; idle conversation that stretches like a piece of thread neither of them quite want to cut. Newt can hear the crinkling of foil as Thomas wraps her up some food to take home and there’s the soft pressure of a held breath as he hugs her in the doorway.

Newt rounds the arch to wave goodbye and Teresa smiles brightly at him.

“I hear you might visit mom and dad next year,” she says.

Newt shrugs. “Probably. You going to be there?”

Teresa sighs a little, but there’s a hard look of determination in her eyes. “I’m going to try. I do miss it; the program’s just been non-stop. It would be nice, though, if you were there - both of you. We could drop by the old haunts, meet the new kids. You could see Thomas’ old room. Mom’s always burning candles and dad’s always sneaking mistletoe into weird places-”

Thomas’ face twists into a mild grimace, and Newt figures his must have too, because Teresa breaks off, frowning and flashing her gaze between them. “Wh...wait. I forgot - you never told me why you don’t hang mistletoe. What happened?”

“Sometimes one time is just too bad to chance a repeat,” Newt says.

Teresa’s eyebrows lift and she folds her arms.

“Gally,” Thomas sighs, when it’s clear she won’t drop it this time. “Only he didn’t exactly hold it above his head.” Teresa blinks rapidly, her cheeks coloring. “He said it was because Minho couldn’t reach.”

“They didn’t-”

“Oh they did,” Newt winces.

Teresa carefully picks up her jaw, looks like she might be contemplating where to get some bleach eyedrops, and then swallows. She nods rapidly. “Yeah, um. We’ll see if dad can leave that in the attic next year.”

x

As soon as Thomas closes the door behind Teresa, he sinks against it, head tipped back and eyes falling closed. He swallows and Newt finds himself moving close, eyes on the smooth way his throat moves; a heavy rise and a slick fall.

“Are we boring adults if we just go to bed now?” Thomas asks, more air than voice. He reaches out blind, and Newt catches his hands, drawing himself forward, pressing Thomas back into the door.

“Probably.”

Newt kisses him, soft and coaxing, but it doesn’t take much. Thomas sighs, his mouth opening, tongue drawing gently against Newt’s. He tastes like sage and cinnamon, the faint tang of beer and the smooth underlying traces of chocolate. For the first time all day, since Thomas left to drag the table down, it feels like time slows. He’s warm and solid, just malleable enough to sink into, his heartbeat a familiar pattern. Newt doesn’t even want to do anything more with this; not suck bruises into his skin, press fingerprints over the scatter of moles on his ribcage or take him apart under the glow of the angel lights.

He just wants to kiss him until they fall asleep.

Newt pulls back. “You okay with being boring?”

“Fuck, yeah,” Thomas exhales.

His fingers reach for the back of Newt’s head and he kisses him again. They wander into bed, never letting go of each other and leave all the lights on, the Father Christmas serenading to itself on the couch.


End file.
